Yaccub's Curse

Yaccub’s Curse

by Wrath James White

Necro Publications

2010

— | — | —

YACCUB’S CURSE © 2009 by Wrath James White

Special Thanks to Brian Keene for his unending support and guidance, to Rosie Marte for the encouragement, patience, and belief in me during the writing of this, to Christie Marie White for the encouragement and support during the rewriting, to Tod Clark, my dedicated reader for his enthusiasm and encouragement, and to Maurice Broaddus for getting it.

To Sultan, my son. In hopes that you will inherit a better world than the one I did and a life free of racism, poverty, and violence. This is for you.

— | — | —

Prologue

6,000 years ago on the island of Paean in the Aegean Sea a child was created from the genetic material harvested from the followers of an ancient geneticist from Mecca named Dr. Yaccub. The child was of a pigment many shades lighter than the Africans from whose DNA he had been cloned and his eyes were like the sky and his hair like fields of wheat. But he had been created for destruction and his birth would signify the enslavement of the tribes of Shabass.

“…This once said by a girl who couldn’t quit/ dope man please can I have another hit/ then the dope man said I don’t give a shit/ if your girl kneels down and sucks my dick.”

—NWA, “Dope Man”

««—»»

A parade of lost souls shambled up and down Germantown Avenue as the day came to an end. The destitute and drug addled, in various stages of intoxication and withdrawal crowded the street in every direction. They staggered out of bars, nodded in alleys and doorways, and paced the sidewalk, desperate for the next score, eyes filled with hunger and madness. It looked like a blaxploitation version of Night of The Living Dead.

Dealers as old as fifty and as young as ten slang little white rocks of hardened cocaine mixed with baking soda to legions of the damned. Hopelessly addicted whores gyrated their emaciated half-naked bodies trying to attract a customer with whom to share their disease. Germantown Ave was one big outdoor fleamarket for drugs and sex.

The gaudy red BMW sat idling at the curb. Its driver, a light-skinned black man with a lopsided yellow-toothed grin, leered out at the whores wandering the avenue. The passenger in the back seat was obscured by night, watching as a teenage whore with a large round ass that had somehow survived the ravages of chronic cocaine use stepped out of the shadows. Those remarkable buttocks bounced and jiggled seductively as she strolled the avenue.

She had full succulent lips that were chapped and cracked where they had burned on the end of a glass pipe and breasts that had likewise remained full and ripe. She hadn’t yet lost as much weight as the other whores on the avenue but her hygiene had fallen to utter slovenliness. Her hair was a ragged tangle of split ends and singed knaps where a hot comb had burned it down to the roots. Her breath was an exhalation from the grave as if she’d brushed her teeth with road-kill and the stench wafting from between her thighs was like she’d recently been inseminated by a corpse.

The minute she spotted the hideous gold-clustered front grille of the BMW sedan, she made a beeline for it. Even through the dense miasma of narcotics clouding her mind she could recognize a drug dealer when she saw one. Her foul breath steamed through the open window into the face of the pale grinning demon that sat behind the windshield.

“Hey, sexy, I’ll suck your dick if you got some rock.”

A ghostly hand wearing a diamond pinky ring and platinum Rolex rose up from the man’s lap holding a crack pipe loaded with little white stones of hardened cocaine.

“Get in.”

Quickly she wiggled around to the passenger side door and into the car.

“Hi, my name is Sissy,” she said, smiling wide, her eyes aflame with desire for the rock rattling around in the fire chamber of the little pipe.

“I don’t give a fuck what your name is,” the man replied. When he turned to look the prostitute in the eyes she was shocked to see his white skin and blue eyes.

“You’re a white boy?”

“What tha fuck do you care? A cock is a cock right? And a rock is a rock.” He unzipped his pants and withdrew his modest erection. Then he grabbed a handful of Sissy’s hair and shoved her head down into his lap ramming his penis past her tonsils. Sissy sucked obediently to keep from gagging as he stomped on the gas and sped off down the street.

The fire red BMW screeched into the parking lot of Lingelbach elementary school just as Sissy began to scream. Skeletal white hands held her head down as his organ exploded in her mouth, filling her throat with his warm seed. He held her head down as he continued to cum then he pinched her nose shut and shoved his cock even deeper into her throat until she choked. She gagged reflexively, her throat spasming and her stomach heaving, regurgitating into his lap as his cock swelled in her esophagus and semen spurted down her throat . He still did not release her. She began to thrash and fight against him as semen and vomit clogged her airway and the man continued to pinch her nose shut, He shoved a gun under her chin.

“If you bite me, bitch, you die that same second. You heard? Now, keep suckin’. You swallow my cum now bitch or I’ll fly your fuckin’ wig. Nasty bitch threw-up all over me. Yellow Dog, can you believe this shit?”

The driver, who was called Yellow Dog by everyone except his mother, laughed and shook his head. The white man continued applying pressure to the whore’s neck, forcing his undiminished erection deeper and deeper until he could feel her mouth pressing into his pubic hair. Her eyes were wild, gasping for air, as he tucked the gun back into its holster and pinched her nose shut again. She punched at his thighs as tears wept from her eyes and she swallowed her own thick vomit and bile, almost throwing up again as it slid down her throat in warm nauseating chunks.

He let go of her nose and raised the crack pipe to his lips.

“Fire this shit up for me, Yellow Dog. I want to get high while this bitch sucks me off.”

“Damn, Scratch, you got this bitch’s vomit all over you. I ain’t touchin’ that shit. It’s all over your hands too!”

“Fuck it. I’ll do it myself then.”

Even through her agony her eyes tracked the pipe as it fluttered above her, wanting to lose herself in its vapors. Scratch laughed, a shrill maniacal cackle, as he released her head in order to bring the disposable lighter to the bottom of the pipe and inhale deeply of the narcotic fumes.

Sissy’s eyes rolled in her skull, wide with shock, as she raised her head from the white man’s lap and gasped for breath. She fought back the spasm in her stomach that threatened to let loose with another bout of vomiting.

“You mutherfucker! You almost killed me!”

“I guess I didn’t try hard enough then.”

He inhaled deeply and the crack pipe flared. He removed a .45 automatic from a shoulder holster as the cocaine roared through his veins. Scratch’s eyes glowed like halogen lamps.

Scratch pointed the gun at the whore’s stomach and pulled the trigger twice, blowing its contents onto the opposite door. The whore’s aborted fetus flopped out onto the floor of the BMW along with much of her intestines.

He took another hit from the pipe then put the gun to the woman’s temple and voided her brains onto the car window. He reached across the woman’s corpse to open the car door. An avalanche of blood poured from her stomach wound, her mouth, nose, ears, and the hole in her temple. Her body flopped around in the seat, convulsing in its death throes. The driver shook his head in disgust looking back over the front seat at the dead prostitute bleeding all over the leather upholstery.

“I hope to hell you don’t think I’m cleaning that shit up! Why’d you have to do that shit in the car?”

“Fuck it. I’ll buy a new one.”

The drug dealer opened the car door and kicked the prostitute’s brutalized corpse out onto the sidewalk where it continued to kick and spasm. He reached down and picked the fetus up from where it lay half under the front seat. It had been nearly decapitated by the gunshot to its mother’s belly. He held it up to his face and examined it closely.

“That’s fuckin’ nasty, yo! What the hell are you lookin’ at that thing for?”

Scratch tossed the dead baby out of the car onto the sidewalk beside its mother.

“Just fuckin’ drive.”

— | — | —

Chapter 1

“If you don’t know me then you’ve no right to judge me! I’ve got a good heart but this heart can get ugly.”

—DMX

««—»»

I bite down on the barrel. I never liked the way metal tasted, especially not gun metal and not a gun that’s been used as much as mine. I can still taste sulfur and gunpowder on the steel. I can taste the oil from its last cleaning. My teeth grate against the metal and a sound like metal in a blender rakes through my skull. I try to imagine what the bullet will feel like. If there will be pain before oblivion.

Che` Guevera said “Freedom comes from the barrel of a gun.” He meant freedom from your oppressors, but the axiom applies equally to freedom from one’s self. From what we are. What we have become.

“I’m going to blow my fucking head off!”

I said it aloud for my own benefit. I needed to hear it. I wasn’t trying to shock anyone. There’s no one else in the house but me. I just wanted to see if I could actually say it. If I could mouth the words around the gun barrel. To test the depths of my conviction. I felt as if I needed to get the words out before the gun would fit properly.

I slip my finger onto the trigger. I’m still not ready. There’s still more words inside of me. Words that have to be spoken before I pump this last shell into my skull and rid the world of another young monster. You’ve got to know why this is necessary.

I reach over and turn on the old tape recorder. It whirs to life and I let out a deep sigh. I open my mouth to speak but the only things that come out of me are tears. They shame me. Not because I think they make me weaker or less of a man, but because I have no right to them. Not after all the pain I’ve caused.

It takes me a few more minutes to get myself back under control before I can continue. I press rewind on the tape recorder and erase the sound of my self-pity. That’s at least one secret I will keep to myself. I press play again.

I’m going to tell you about evil. It’s a long involved story and it damn sure ain’t pretty, but it’s something I’ve got to tell, something you’ve got to hear. Because I want you to hate it like I do. I want you to fight it, in the world and in yourself. Because there’s evil everywhere. Every-fucking-where.

The story has to begin with me because I’m part of it. I’m a great big fucking part of it.

My name is Malik Black. I was born in Philadelphia’s Germantown section. G-town. The ghetto. A slightly nicer ghetto than some of the others in Philadelphia, but a ghetto nonetheless. My shocked and appalled little body was evicted screaming and protesting from my mother’s womb as the summer died and gave birth to fall in September of 1985. I grew up during the height of the drug epidemic or war or whatever the fuck you want to call it. By the time I was old enough to walk the streets unchaperoned they were already tacky with blood, crunchy with broken crack viles, beer bottles, and hypodermic needles, filthy with spent shell casings and wasted dreams. I was carrying a gun myself by the age of ten.

Around the way they called me “Snap” because my temper was as quick as my trigger finger. I’d have fit right in in the Wild West. I killed my first human being at the age of twelve. I’d like to tell you it was something I had to do, that my back was against the wall and I had no other choice. But we’ve all got choices. I killed because I wanted to.

Everybody thinks I’m crazy. I probably am. I didn’t start out as a killer though. None of us did. The psychotropic depressant of ghetto life, of waking up everyday to watch the roaches scurry from the morning light and the crack whores scamper to catch the last trick of the day, of going to sleep to the sound of gunfire and the cries and curses of domestic violence, altered critical nuero-pathways in my brain warping an otherwise civilized human being into the hardened gangsta I am now.

Perhaps I am a bad seed genetically predisposed to murder, some mad scientist’s joke on the world like Scratch said. Some may argue that I inherited my rage from my father and all the generations of angry black men that preceded him. I don’t know what the truth is anymore. Nothing makes sense.

I didn’t vivisect animals in my basement, set fire to old folk’s homes, or read crime novels and dream of infamy. I wasn’t the only thing that went wrong with my generation. It was the entire decade in which I was born that was hostile and deranged and I simply conformed to this fucked up climate, instinctively acting for the preservation of self. But even that might be a lie. It’s possible, that I started it all, if not now then generations ago, eons ago.

It should have been no surprise that the rage, violence, hatred, and hopelessness of G-town, the same place that gave birth to me, would have drawn an even greater evil to it. That worse things than our little gang would be attracted to the heat of gunfire, the screams of the dying, and the rivers of blood that ran down the street gutters like worthless sewage. G-town was the nexus of all realities. It’s where all the shit landed in Philadelphia when it fell.

But how would we have spotted a monster amongst the madness we lived in everyday? Most of my friends were murderers, thieves, drug dealers. Some were rapists. Some were worse. You pick out the monster. I had bodies on me too. None of us were angels.

Now, it’s easy to see Scratch for what he really is. Hindsight is pretty damn near omniscient. But back then dude just looked like one of us. Like just another pissed off thug. We were so busy doing our own evil we wouldn’t have recognized Satan if he’d been sitting right beside us waiting for us to pass him a blunt or a forty, which he often was. Yeah, I brought the devil to his throne in G-town. But I was the one who sent his ass back to hell too.

Of course Scratch was well on his way to becoming a serious ghetto star when I met him in that old lot on Cherokee Street five years ago. With my help though, he became a superstar.

««—»»

Germantown, sitting like a jungle cat waiting to spring on the Northwest side of Philadelphia, wasn’t what you would call hell. That was further east in North Philadelphia. But it was a hellacious place for us impressionable youths to learn the ways of the world. I often wonder how my perspective might have been different if I had grown up in Cherry Hill New Jersey or some lily-white suburb on the Main Line. How long would it have taken me to learn to hate? In Germantown we were weaned on violence and hatred. My boy Huey liked to say that when kids are born in the ghetto the doctors smacked them until they stopped crying.

G-town was where all the Black folks from North Philly moved when they started making a little bank and got bold enough to attempt to improve their living conditions. It was pure futility really because as soon as Black families moved in the white families moved out, the city began to neglect the neighborhood, allowing it to fall into disrepair becoming no better than the slums they left behind. They paid exorbitant prices to escape the ghetto and buy into this more integrated neighborhood only to see their property values plummet as white folks packed up as fast as black folks moved in and with them left all the public utilities and maintenance. Street lamps stayed broken for months casting entire blocks into a deadly sinister darkness that incubated crime. The streets fell into disrepair as the road crews neglected them allowing them to crack and split becoming an obstacle course of potholes and fissures. The sidewalks crumbled providing ammo for rock fights. Sometimes the trash wouldn’t be picked up for weeks and garbage would blow up and down the street smothering the neighborhood in stench and debris.

Mom and I took to driving our garbage up to Chestnut Hill and dropping it off in front of the homes of rich white folks. Buildings would sometimes burn to the ground before fire trucks arrived and then their charred skeletons would remain for years, swaying in the breeze and providing refuge for crackheads, junkies, and winos. When they finally got around to demolishing the rat infested deathtraps, they rarely rebuilt. The neighborhood was filled with these empty lots scarring the landscape; irregularly spaced between the endless rows of identical homes like gaps in a smile. Police brutality and harassment increased exponentially with the Caucasian exodus and getting an officer’s help was like trying to squeeze your ass through a donut hole. By the time my generation came along, this nice integrated neighborhood had become like an extension of North Philly; just another fuckin’ ghetto filled with the angry and the hopeless.

My family and I lived on Ambrose Street, between Washington Lane and Duval Street, a few blocks from G-town High and only a mile or two from Wissahickon Park. It was also adjacent to Mount Airy, an upper middle class neighborhood where people like Patti Labelle and Teddy Pendergrass lived.

Mt. Airy had old colonial mansions and lush tree-lined streets so everyday we got a first hand look at what we would never have. Because of our proximity to them, we went to the same schools as the Mt. Airy kids and they were always eager to rub our noses in their comparative wealth. This made us acutely aware of our own poverty and desperate for and resentful of their affluence. Desperate enough to rob our neighbors, kill, sell drugs, pimp, ho, or whatever nefarious enterprise would get us paid the most and the fastest. It was better to live down in North Philly where at least you would never see what you were missing.

Everyone I knew from G-town would lie in school and claim to be from Mt. Airy; ashamed of their destitution. That is until gangsta rap blew up and poverty suddenly became fashionable. Over night there were suddenly punk ass Mt. Airy boys and even white boys from Chestnut Hill wearing their pants saggin’ off their hips, toting nine millimeters and claiming thug life, frontin’ like they grew up in the G or in North Philly just to seem hard, eager to capitalize off the inherent hipness of the underclass. It was disgusting and it infuriated me.

We lived in a three bedroom row home that was nearly two centuries old and not carrying its age well at all. It was made of red brick that had faded to a chalky orange color and looked like every other house on the block. In the summer it was an oven and in the winter it was a meat locker. They didn’t know a lot about insulation back in the seventeen hundreds.

I can remember few truly happy moments in that drafty old haunt. Watching creature double feature at the foot of Mom’s bed and listening to her calm breathing as she slept away on Saturday afternoons, playing with the dog in the yard, eating my Grandma’s sweet potato pie and my Mom’s fried chicken, catching crawfish in the creek that ran through Wissahickon Park and coming home and trying to breed them in the bathtub, having sex with the babysitter, shooting squirrels and pigeons off the powerlines with slingshots and pellet guns. But mostly all I can remember is the violence and the rage.

Annabella Black, a gorgeous, nearly six foot, chocolate black, amazon goddess was my mom. Everyone called her Bella, which means beautiful in Italian, except my grandma who still called her Annabella Blacksmith even though she knew we had dropped the “smith” off our names before I was even born. Mom didn’t want me to be born with the name of my Great great great great grandfather’s slave master.

To this day I’ve never met a woman more lovely than my mother. She looked like she had ridden a sun beam down from heaven and I loved her more than anything in creation, which wasn’t hard because I hated just about everything else. My Dad’s name was Darryl and he looked like something that had stepped off the wall of a pyramid, but he had problems…violent problems.

Mom used to say that Vietnam destroyed the best Black Men of her generation…even those who made it home. She kept telling me how Pops was a good man before the war but that all the horrors he had witnessed and was forced to participate in had twisted him.

Pops was 6’2” tall, lanky, ripped with hard wiry muscle, midnight black, with a huge wooly afro, a goatee, a boyish smile, dark smoldering eyes, and big hands roped with veins ending in long spidery fingers. He looked like that famous painting “The Moorish King” that hung in the Philadelphia Art museum, like a Black Moses. His voice was smooth like marijuana smoke curling out of the end of one of those hand-carved pipes and he had game. He could put the mack down on a female so smooth that her panties would slide off from their own lubrication. If he hadn’t married mom he probably would have wound up being a pimp. As it was, he was totally legit.

He worked hard doing construction work for the city and brought home every cent to care for my mom and me, but like many hard working men he drank hard too. When he wasn’t working, Pops and I would sit on the living room floor playing with GI Joe, army men, video games, and electric race sets while he slowly drank himself into an introspective fugue. When the toys inevitably broke, he always seemed to be more depressed about it than I was and replaced them immediately. He would play football with the older kids on the block after work and they all looked up to him like he was a big brother or something. Still, they were all afraid of him. He was one mean-ass-nigga. He was known to chase people off of his car at shotgun point and more than one of the neighborhood kids had watched as their dads were beaten bloody by him. He was nothing to fuck with and no one did.

There were rumors that he had killed people and I couldn’t really deny it. He had killed in Nam so why not in the hood?

Pops was one of those psycho Nam vets. Not the kind that climb towers and shoot demons dressed as pedestrians but the kind that have flashbacks and scare the hell out of their families. With eyes glazed staring deep into a long ago tropical jungle he would scream and cry believing that he was back in Saigon dodging mortar fire. During these episodes he often beat my Mom up pretty badly. It still wounds me to remember the flow of her tears and how helpless I was to staunch their tide. If Pops was around today and he tried that shit I’d put his ass right where he is now, on the wrong side of the grave. Deep down, I guess I’m still waiting to settle the score. I owe him some pain for hurting my mother. For making that elegant goddess weep.

Sometimes I wonder if all the shit I’ve been through has just been preparation for the day when I finally see that sonuvabitch again. And I will someday. I’ll see him in hell. And then we’ll settle up.

To this day I can remember the gruesome war stories he used to tell and how they would keep me up all night terrified that the “Cong” were creeping through the bushes, preparing to ambush me and drag me off to a prison camp. He once told me how the guys in his platoon would take captured Vietnamese soldiers and tie them upside down to a tree then beat them in the head with bamboo poles until their brains would leak out of their ears. I couldn’t picture it then. Now it’s easy to imagine. I’ve accomplished similar feats with my shotgun. Back then, however, as I cringed in the dark listening to my mother’s screams and his angry curses, his stories would warp my dreams into a gore-streaked delirium. I guess they scared him too because he always slept with his eyes open.

Once when I was just five years old he was in the midst of a really bad hallucination and had my mom down on the living room floor with her arms pinned behind her back, the stained glass coffee table was shattered and he was cursing and crying, but his eyes were glassy and far off, focused on nothing, full of rage and fear. I knew he wasn’t in our apartment anymore, but in a Vietnamese jungle thousands of miles away. He punched my Mom in her head and I saw her eyes roll back revealing the whites. She looked as if she had died. Then he began to strangle her. That’s when I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the knife.

It was one of those carving knives they sold on TV. The one where the guy saws through a tin can without dulling the blade. I stared at the lethal looking serrations that ran like a row of shark’s teeth down the edge of the blade and my heart fluttered. My legs filled with lead. I raised the knife, but I couldn’t move my feet to cross the distance that separated me from my desperately struggling mother. There was a strangled exhalation that sounded like the last gasp of a dying man and that got me moving. Mom was dying.

I ran into the living room and let out a yell that sounded like something from a Tarzan movie. I plunged the blade between his shoulder blades stabbing it in as deep as my five-year-old muscles would permit, which wasn’t much at all. He spun around and punched me hard, like you would strike a grown man, like you would strike an enemy. He knocked me out cold.

When I woke up I was in a hospital and my Mom was beside me screaming and crying in hysterics.

“You muthafuckin’ evil bastard! You hurt my baby! If he ain’t alright I swear to God you’re a dead muthafucka! You hear me, nigga?! You’s dead muthafucka!” My mother was standing right in Pop’s face. Her 5’11” looked every bit as formidable as his 6’2”; her arms just as sinuous, her afro just as wild and woolly, her eyes shooting napalm. She had a mother’s instinctive fury when her offspring is threatened and even a bad muthafucka like Pops found himself humbled by it. His head was bowed and his hands were clasped in front of him fidgeting nervously. His eyes were red and full of tears (Though none would ever spill down his cheeks. He was too damned proud for that.) He kept casting worried looks in my direction throughout Mom’s diatribe.

“Baby, I’m sorry. You know I’d never hurt that boy on purpose. See, look. His eyes are open. He’s all right, baby…” He looked desperate and Mom wasn’t going for it.

“What? You some fuckin’ kind of doctor now? How tha fuck do you know he’s all right?” She spat, glowering at him with her fierce bloodshot eyes.

“How’s my baby? Don’t worry Momma’s gonna take care of you. Aw, look at your beautiful face. Look what that bastard did to your pretty face!”

I didn’t care what he had done to my face. To me, my face wasn’t no big deal anyway. Round and pudgy instead of hard and lean like the cowboys and gangsters on television. I was more concerned with what he had done to her face. It was bruised and swollen, a huge black and purple hematoma covered her right eye, her lip was split open and plumped to the size of a ping-pong ball.

I cried when I looked at the damage my father had done. He had vandalized her. Beat a reckless graffiti of welts and bruises across her flawless face. I hated myself for letting him see me cry. This man who had taught me that men never cried. Who had broken me out of my fear of water by holding my head an inch above the seawater so that the waves would crash into me as they rolled in and held me like that until I finally stopped crying five or ten minutes later. Who had taught me to fight in preschool by punching the shit out of me and making me punch him back while ordering me not cry. Who goaded me into my first fight at age four, a dispute over a goddamned tricycle, and patted me on the back when I beat a bigger, older boy viciously without shedding a tear and without stopping until I saw blood even when he was down, despite the kid’s blubbering apology and pleads for mercy. But I wasn’t crying for me. I was crying for him. Because I loved him, because I admired him, the coolest dad on the block, and because I knew I was gonna have to kill him someday. And because I knew Mom would miss him.

Mom gingerly inspected my contusions letting me know that my nose was broken and that two of my teeth were missing. Baby teeth. They would grow back. I’d also received a concussion and for years afterward Mom would blame it for all of my madness. Softly I caressed her blackened eye and savaged lip with my tiny fingertips as the tears flowed freely down my face. Her tears began to flow also. I turned to glare into Pop’s face and was amazed to find that he couldn’t meet my gaze, cowed by the weight of his own guilt. He bowed his head and shuffled out of the room cursing to hisself as if his foul mouth could fight off his shame. My eyes followed him right out the door. I was no longer afraid to show my tears. I displayed them proudly; this small rebellion against his will.

“If he ever hurts you again I’m gonna kill ’im, Mom. I swear Momma, I’ll kill ’im if he hurts you again!” I broke down and my quiet tears became racking sobs as Moms held me in her arms. She rocked me, humming softly, until I fell asleep. As I lay snoring in her lap, she began to wonder what life would be like as a single parent.

She left him a few years later when I was eight years old and moved in with my grandmother. Grandma was a bible thumping Baptist, 40 pounds overweight with bad knees, arthritis in her hands, gray hair, extremely hypocritical and judgmental as the devout tend to be, but loving and tolerant almost doting with me even if she could not extend the same compassion and understanding to her own child. I was her first born grandson and as such I could do no wrong. Life with her was great. She and Mom fought a lot but it never got violent like with Darryl (I no longer called him Pop and never would again.)

Fighting had become a sort of hobby with me. It was the only thing I was good at. My mother and grand mother were constantly forced into the position of consoling parents whose children had received a taste of my wrath. The older kids and the big-time players who hung out in front of the corner store selling weed and talkin’ shit used to bet on my fights and sometimes pay me to beat up other little kids just to give them something to watch.

My very first day in the neighborhood I got into it with an older boy.

“Hey, little bro. You need some new kicks and bad. Them sneaks you got on are so dogged out that they’s barkin’!” He laughed.

The kid had been riding by my porch on a Huffy mountain bike and had stopped in the middle of the street just to diss me about my worn out sneakers. Someone else’s poverty was not something you joked about in the ghetto. I rose from that stoop knowing that we were going to brawl.

He probably mistook me for an older kid because of my size and wanted to try to improve his rep by being the first one on the block to beat up the new kid.

He was about ten years-old, three years older than me, ink black, skinny as a famine victim, and wore his hair in a wild afro. He had bucked teeth and big lips and probably had a chip on his shoulder about it. So naturally I made them the focus of my verbal assault.

“Fuck your old buck-toothed Donald Duck lookin’ ass!”

The bigger kid was off his bike and at my throat in half a second.

“What tha fuck did you call me?”

I didn’t really want to tangle with this older kid so I decided to let him know how young I was.

“Man you a punk! Messin’ with an eight year-old kid as big as you is!”

He wasn’t going for it though and he punched me right in my mouth. I fell over and he dove on top of me preparing for the ground and pound, but some teenagers who were hangin’ out on the corner caught the whole exchange and luckily intervened on my behalf.

“Yo, Sid! Man, don’t be messin’ with that little kid. Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”

They gathered around us and pulled him off of me, but not before he delivered two more blows to my head. While they held him I jumped up and punched him right in the stomach, doubling him over. The teenagers all laughed.

“This a tough little thug right here! He took that ass whuppin’ and he ain’t even cryin’. I remember how Sid used to cry like a little bitch every time somebody got in his ass.”

Sid wanted to jump on me again, but the other kids held him back.

“Don’t even fuck with him Sid ’cause you shouldn’t have started with him in the first place. Now ya’ll are even.”

“Naw fuck that!” Sid shrieked in a high-pitched falsetto whine that raked my nerves. “I ain’t lettin’ this little bitch get away with that! I’ll let my little brother kick his ass. They both the same size. Yo, Jay!”

Sid pulled free from the other boys and called to some kids up the street who were racing Hot Wheels cars down a large pile of dirt that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk for some inecsplicable reason in front of a burnt out house. The biggest one of them lifted his head and looked our way. Jay was a carbon copy of his brother, big lips, bucked teeth and all. He was slightly smaller than his older sibling though still larger than me. He was perhaps only a year younger than his older brother. He trotted over wearing brand new shell-top Adidas and a red and white Sixers jersey.

“Jay, take care of my light work!”

He pointed towards me and I looked at the older boys for help, but apparently this was all fair and honorable to them because they backed off to give us room to fight, forming a loose circle around us. I looked back over at my grandmother’s house and was amused to see her and my mother still unloading the U-haul truck. We hadn’t even moved in good yet and here I was already about to get into a fight. My mom probably thought I was playing innocently and was no doubt happy to see how quickly I was making friends.

I knew I could have gotten myself out of all that drama just by calling for her, but then these kids would have thought I was a punk and a mama’s boy. In retrospect, that may not have been such a bad thing. Instead I took the first step on the road to building one of the most fearsome reputations the G had ever known. I stepped up to that kid like I was the baddest little muthafucka on the planet.

“If I win, I’m takin’ those sneaks.” I said pointing down at his shiny new Adidas.

“You ain’t gonna win, punk!” he replied and as far as I was concerned that was as good as a handshake.

“Bet!” I said and began swinging hooks at his head as hard and fast as I could surprising myself by landing more than I missed. He tried to swing back, but his punches were smothered by the deluge of blows I was raining down on him. I started kicking at him too and pretty soon he was turning to run. I tackled him and threw him in a headlock.

“Now give up those sneaks or I’m gonna tear your head off!” I was jerking on his neck and dragging him around the street. He was crying and calling for his brother, but the older boys were once again holding Sid back.

“Your brother ain’t helping you, fool! Now take them sneaks off! I ain’t playin!”

He took them off and I took them home. When my mom asked me where I had gotten them from I told her some of the kids down the street had found them and since I was the only one small enough to fit them they let me have them for a dollar. Lying came as easily to me as fighting.

“And where did you get a dollar from?”

“Grandma gave it to me yesterday.”

“Well, I think you spent it well,” Grandma interrupted, peeking over her glasses at my little feet then back at the shoes I held in my hands. “Them old things you wearin’ now are ’bouts ta fall off your feet.”

My mom went back outside to finish emptying the truck before Grandma could start in on her about how dirty I always looked and how she had never let any of her children look that way.

I wore those Adidas, the first brand name sneakers I had ever owned, until my toes busted out the front and beat Sid with a stick when he tried to get them back from me.

— | — | —

Chapter 2

“Don’t you know… That it’s true… That for me… And for you… The World Is A Ghetto?”

—War, “The World Is A Ghetto”

««—»»

There was a war going on in our neighborhood. Every morning you could smell the burnt carbon and sulfur lingering in the air after a gun battle. It filled your nostrils as you rose to greet the day. No bacon and eggs. No morning paper. Instead you counted the bullet holes in the walls from stray shots to see how close you’d come to not waking up at all and checked your family members to make sure there wasn’t suddenly one less.

In school you could see that wide-eyed shock and nervous fidgeting of post traumatic stress disorder on kids as young as eight and nine who had already lost brothers, cousins, or even parents and grandparents to the war. Some of them were already soldiers themselves. I was insulated from most of it by over-protective parents and living the proper distance from the Avenue. My street was mostly quiet. I was one of only four kids on the block. The rest were all old people. There just wasn’t much gang activity among the geriatric set. But ours was just a small oasis in a desert of violence and crime. Even on the next block there were bodies dropping almost nightly as the hierarchy of criminal power resolved itself through gunfire.

Increased pressure from the government forced the Mafia out of the street-level drug business leaving other organized gangs to fight over the lucrative market which was suddenly wide open. The Jamaican drug posses came blasting through the neighborhood eager to take over the cocaine business, that the Italians had abandoned, from the local thugs, the so-called Junior Black Gangsta Lords. The results were drive-by shootings that left more innocents dead than the intended targets. Including children. Then there was Scratch, a white drug dealer from North Philadelphia who was starting to prop his dealers up in some of the open air drug markets up and down Germantown Avenue. He kept a low profile, but it was pretty well known that he was waiting to mop up after the war between the Jamaicans and the JBGL. He had used the same opportunistic approach in North Philadelphia and now he was the biggest dealer in that part of the city with a crew of nearly a thousand soldiers and dealers. He was the last thing G-town needed.

When the Jamaicans took over the JBGL Scratch started making his presence known more and more and the results were lots of dead Jamaicans. Scratch’s reputation was one of unbelievable violence. The reality of his activities on the street was worse than anything you’d ever heard in even the most brutal gangsta-rap song or over-the-top slasher movie. Scarface didn’t have shit on him. In G-town, he fit right in. Soon, his dealers were shoulder to shoulder with dealers from the JBGL competing for customers on the Ave.

Germantown Avenue separated a dungeonous slum of filth, poverty, and despair on the Eastside from the only slightly more tolerable ghetto on the West. Between the two lay a stretch of concrete wilderness that contained more bars and liquor stores per square inch than any zoning commissioner would allow anywhere but in a slum that was carefully planned to remain that way. Churches, fast food joints, bars, and liquor stores, and in front of each one prowled a drug dealer eager to capitalize off the hopelessness that each venue attracted.

“Oh, Jesus didn’t do it for you today, huh? You don’t want to wait for heaven do ya? You want something that’ll take you there right now? Well, I got just the thing.”

“Hey, big girl! What some fool dumped you so now you’re gonna binge on fried chicken to forget him? All that’s gonna do is make you so fat you’ll never be able to get another man. Here, this’ll help you forget him and lose a few pounds too. Smoke on this for a while and soon you won’t be thinkin’ about that man or that chicken,” a dealer named Yellow Dog hollered as he hung out the passenger side window of a blood-red BMW that looked as if it had been caught in a jewelry store explosion.

Scratch didn’t just hire drug dealers he hired drug pushers. Everyone who worked for him was a salesman for the product. And they were all killers. Yellow Dog was the worst of them. He was second in command, if there was such a thing, and was as dangerous as a hyena. He was so light-skinned that he almost looked white himself except for his wide nose and thick lips.

The red BMW cruised slowly up the Ave with Scratch behind the wheel and Yellow Dog leering out the window at the crackwhores prancing and preening for all the dealers and customers alike that glutted the overpopulated street. It looked like some type of festival was going on, “Crack Head Day” or some shit.

“You said you wanted a pregnant one right?” Yellow Dog asked with his eyes still hunting through the parade of drug ravaged flesh.

“Yeah, one that’s just about to pop.” Scratch replied. His eyes radiated more hatred than lust, but Yellow Dog seemed oblivious.

“That’s some sick shit, bro. But I know a lot of guys who like them knocked up whores. They say the pussy’s wetter and their titties are all fat and swollen. I knew a cat who liked to drink milk from them pregnant bitches’ titties. He said it tasted like cream. He got his girl knocked up and tried to drink that bitch dry. After the baby was born he would be nursing right alongside the little rugrat.”

“That’s not what I want the bitch for.” Scratch replied with his blue eyes still spitting icy flame and Yellow Dog fell silent.

“Hey, there’s a pregnant bitch right there but I don’t think she’s a whore though.”

“Is she buyin’ crack?”

“Yeah, I think she is.”

“Then she’s a fuckin’ whore! Go scoop her ass up.”

“Yeah, but I’ve seen that chick walking around with her head all wrapped up. I think she’s a Muslim or some shit.”

Scratch smiled wide so that his gold plated smile caught moonlight and beamed it back.

“Even better. Go get that bitch.”

Yellow Dog wasn’t really down with raping a Muslim woman, but he was even less enamored of the idea of having his head blown off by his murderous employer for disobeying orders. Scratch pulled to the curb and Yellow Dog slipped from the car. He hit the sidewalk right beside the Muslim woman and whispered into her ear.

“Aren’t you with the Nation, sister? What you doin’ up here buyin’ crack?”

Startled, the woman whirled around and found herself staring into the sleepy-eyed leer of the mulatto gangsta who grinned at her like he’d caught her with a dick in her mouth. She looked at him and then quickly dropped her eyes to her feet.

“I-I-I have a problem.” She stammered as she tried to walk around him and avoid his accusatory eyes.

“Well, then let me help you, sista.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know that it wouldn’t do for anyone else to see you up here on the Ave. Why don’t you hop in my ride and let me get you out of here. Then I’ll get you fixed up proper.” Yellow Dog opened his hand to reveal the four vials of crack rolling around in his palm and her eyes were instantly drawn to them. She didn’t hear a word he said after that. Nothing else mattered. She would have followed him anywhere for the promise of the pipe. Her addiction was strong. Obviously Allah had not been enough to tame it.

Yellow Dog walked with her to the Beemer and opened the passenger door with a flourish. When she looked in and saw Scratch behind the wheel she turned to Yellow Dog with rage and disgust twisting her face into a vicious snarl.

“You didn’t say anything about riding with no devils!”

“All White people aren’t devils, young lady…” Scratch pulled his big shiny nickel plated .45 and pointed it right at the woman’s belly. His eyes gleamed with a feral lust that ignited the icy irises like lanterns. “…Just me. Now get the fuck in this car and let me show you some of this here tricknology.”

He grinned wider as Yellow Dog covered her mouth to prevent her from screaming and shoved her into the car.

“Allow me to introduce myself, sista. My name is Scratch and I’m the trickster your minister warned you about.”

— | — | —

Chapter 3

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victim he intends to eat until he eats them.”

—Samuel Butler

««—»»

After living in that neighborhood for several months and mostly playing by myself I somehow managed to make friends with a few kids. Nikky and his big brother Warlock were my first real road dogs in the neighborhood. Warlock was a sixteen year-old drug dealer, graffiti artist, and wannabe pimp. He wore Cross Colors sweat suits, and gold chains so thick they looked like slave restraints. His hair was cut into a gravity-defying block taper that stuck up more than a foot from his head.

Warlock was a lethal looking street snake with eyes that were perpetually narrowed in suspicion and yellowed from blunt smoke. He was skinny as a rail and knee-high to a sewer rat, but he was known to be quick as death with a switchblade. With a knife in his hand Warlock would take on men twice his size. He was like a magician whose stainless steel prestidigitation could leave a brother cut from his ass crack to his nut sack in the silence between heartbeats. Warlock had much respect around the way. His brother Nikky was comparatively square.

Nikky was a shy kid who spent all his time drawing, daydreaming, reading comic books, and writing graffiti. Still, he got respect for his lyrical skills. Nikky was an aspiring hip-hop artist who could spin rhymes off the top of his head without missing a beat even though he often stuttered just trying to say hello.

He never wrote any of his rhymes down, but I suspected that during the long minutes he spent daydreaming he was really composing the complex lyrics that were his trademark. He could hold an entire crowd of teenagers enthralled as he stood on the corner spittin’ his gift like a ghetto griot, telling the stories of our lives.

Nikky was thicker than his brother and average height for an eight year-old. His hair was cut conservatively short with rippling waves and tapered on the sides. Both he and his brother were the color of polished oak but where Nikky’s skin was smooth and unblemished, Warlock’s face was a minefield of scars and pock marks and his teeth were covered with braces that looked like a mouthful of barbed wire. Somehow Warlock managed to make that metallic grin look cool. I even asked my mother if I could get braces just to look like him. Unfortunately my teeth were completely straight.

The day I first met the two brothers they were propped up against Warlock’s powder blue 1988 Lincoln Continental blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” as loud as his over-priced stereo system could crank and arguing with another kid Warlock’s age about who could rap better him or Nikky. Warlock was pimpin’ a pair of baggy Turkish pants in that MC Hammer style and an oversized polka dot dress shirt. He wore a furry red Kangol cap on his head and snake skin Stacey Adams. Nikky was dressed more conservatively in a pair of baggy Jive pants that hung low on his hips so that his red and white polka dot Calvin Klein boxers were visible and a T-shirt his brother had airbrushed in wild style graffiti letters that spelled out G-town. I stared at their clothing practically drooling with envy. If it wasn’t for the fact that Nikky looked so self-conscious and uncomfortable in his clothes I would have hated him instantly. I hated anyone rich and anyone coming on my block wearing a pair of $60 Jive jeans while I wore my $19.99 J.C. Penny’s Tough Skins would have been a hated enemy. But there was something about this kid. Even Warlock still looked like a street kid who’d found his fairy godmother and had been blessed for a time with princely garb. There was a fear in his eyes, just below the surface, that all of this wouldn’t last. That tomorrow the car, the stereo, the clothes might all be gone and he’d be right back in the projects choking on filth.

The kid that stood between them was an obvious hanger on. One of those who believed coolness could be passed through osmosis. He wore a greasy do-rag beneath which his naps were baking in an S-curl pomade. His fake Gucci sweatshirt was stained with the stuff. His name was Devin but he preferred to be called “Divinity”. When I walked up they had just started to battle.

“Well, who’s gonna judge this thing? It can’t be you. You’re his brother. Of course you’re gonna say he won.”

Warlock looked around and spotted me kicking a rock across the street looking bored and pretending not to be listening to their conversation.

“Yo! Kid! Come here for a sec!”

I walked over, fighting to keep the grin off my face.

“What’s up, dog?”

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Malik.”

“Well, my name is Warlock. This is my brother Nikky, and this fool here is Devin.”

“Divinity,” he interrupted offering his hand, which I shook without taking my eyes off Warlock.

“Whatever. Anyway, we’re about to have a little battle right here and we want you to be our unbiased judge.”

“I really don’t know that much about rap.”

“You know what you like and what you don’t. That’s good enough.”

“Alright, Devin, you go first.”

“Ay little homie. Can you do a beat box?”

“A what?”

“Nigga stop stallin’ and start flowin’!” Warlock growled.

Warlock started off with some old school tongue twister shit that sounded like a rip-off of Kangol from U.T.F.O. mixed with 2 Live Crew.

“Well, I’m Divinity—In the place to be—I put the girls in ecstasy—every time they see me—rip the microphone like a pair of lace panties—make the girlies scream like I’m all up in their pussy…”

His rap went on and on with that typical B-boy macho misogynistic bravado. Some of it was pretty funny, but none of it was very good. Then Nikky began to flow and what was coming out of his mouth was like nothing I’d ever heard. He was kicking straight poetry.

“Look long and hard—see the heavens scarred—by the impotent tears of a race torn apart— by a prejudice world and our misguided rage—attacking the puppets on a cardboard stage—Now we’re stuck in the gloom of our ghetto tomb—and even love to us is just the herald of doom—Who can I trust in this world of fear? What is beauty to the eyes that shed no tears?”

“Yeah, muthafucka! That’s what I’m talkin’ about, nigga!”

This was the type of genius black folks never got credit for. This kid was probably failing English class yet he could write rhymes with themes, imagery, and rhythms more complex and profound than 99% of the garbage they were teaching us in school. Walt Whitman could kiss my black ass! This was true poetry!

“Man, that wasn’t no rap! I-I don’t know what the fuck that was!” Devin thought for a second and then shook Nikky’s hand, “Yo, but that shit was dope, bro. You gots mad skills!”

“Yo, homes that was the freshest shit I ever heard!”

Yeah, I said fresh. That was like ’93. You could still say fresh in ’93. Couldn’t you?

“Fresh?”

“Aaaaaahahahaha! That fool said the shit was fresh! Naw, bro. It’s dope! It’s butta! It’s ill! It’s sick! But fresh went out with the eighties, son!” Warlock draped an arm around my shoulder still laughing so hard that tears were squeezing out of the corners of his bloodshot eyes.

“Alright, then that shit was sick as fuck!”

“That’s my nigga!” Warlock whooped.

Nikky smiled awkwardly at my unselfconscious admiration and seemed to grow even more uncomfortable if that was even possible.

“Yeah, Nikky’s got a mind like my nine. Mutherfuckin’ cocked and loaded, baby boy. You know he’s in that mentally gifted program at school. They got him reading all kinds of ill shit. Philosphy, literature, poetry. That’s were he gets most of the material for his rhymes.”

“I knew he didn’t make that shit up himself.” Devin declared triumphantly.

“He does make it up himself, fool. The words are his. He just gets the ideas from the books and shit. Fuck am I talkin’ to your bitch ass for anyway? You lost, nigga. Now get the fuck up off my car. We outta here, son. Got some business to take care of. You wanna ride along little homie?” Warlock asked, grinning at me with his braces shining in the afternoon sun.

“Sure.”

Warlock slid behind the wheel of the big Lincoln and Nikky and I bounced into the backseat. He pulled out some top paper and a sack of weed the size of a handbag and began rolling a joint. His bony effeminate fingers caressed the rolling papers almost lovingly as he sprinkled the marijuana down into it like a French chef seasoning a soufflé, holding it between thumbs and middle fingers with his index fingers sticking out and up in the air. He whipped his long narrow tongue along the edge of the paper, gave it several twists to close it, fired it up with a gold zippo lighter, took a long hit, and then passed it to me as he started to cough.

“This is some good shit.” He wheezed between coughs.

All of this happened in what seemed like seconds. I held the joint in my hands and looked over at Nikky who smiled at me and waved me on impatiently. I took a huge hit and immediately began coughing convulsively.

Fifteen minutes later we were all cruising around the hood passing the joint around. It was the first time I had ever gotten high and my head felt like it was filled with helium. My thoughts sloshed around my head in an inarticulate jumble and came out of my mouth the same way.

“Yo, my niggas, we need to get us some of those cheeseburgers from Mickey D’s or some Tasty Kakes or some shit. I’m hungry as a muthafucka! You know they don’t put enough chips in them potato chip bags. They all full of air now. Damn pretzels supposed to be soft, but they hard as a mutherfucka. I don’t want none of them big Jewish pickles neither! They look like Frankenstein’s dick. Pass me that joint, nigga!”

Warlock and Nikky laughed every time I spoke, which made me laugh as well. I was tore up from the floor up, rolling around in the backseat of the Continental, giggling and dropping marijuana ashes all over the brand new blue suede upholstery.

“Fool, don’t you set my seats on fire back there! Pass me that shit before you waste it all!”

Warlock, Nikky, and I started hanging out everyday after that; getting high and composing rap lyrics. Sometimes I would go bombing with them. We would fill our backpacks with Krylon or Rustoleum spray paint stolen from the hardware store. Warlock insisted that we steal it even though he had enough money to buy the store out. That was part of the tradition he said.

“Only toy muthafuckas buy the shit. Real bombers steal it! Guerilla warfare, my nigga! Artistic terrorism!”

We would hit the school yards at both of the neighborhood elementary schools and both Martin Luther King and Germantown High, then we would hop on the back of the SEPTA rail trains, ride them, to the end of the line, and tag trains down in the yard.

Hopping the trains was no joke. Tulpehocken station was a shack that stood behind a plush exclusive retirement home engulfed in a mayhem of lewd, incoherent, iconoclastic, scribblings. Tremendous evergreen trees jutted up twenty or thirty feet in the air on the other side of the tracks and a carefully maintained lawn spread out lavishly from the station to the old folks’ home.

On our side of the tracks was a crumbling parking lot overlooked by dilapidated apartment buildings. White folks from Wissahickon and Black folks from G-town sat together on the benches beneath grafitti that read “Big Mike Rules!” or “Jane sucks dick and drinks cum!” casting nervous glances at one another as they waited to catch the train down to jobs as economically segregated as the neighborhoods they left behind.

It was here that we would come, scrambling over the tracks carrying backpacks filled with stolen Krylon spray paint. The train would thunder down the track with its whistle cutting the calm like a scythe and we would wait for the passengers to climb aboard before sneaking onto the back of the train and holding on for dear life. Mile after mile the train rambled along, lurching through turns with its iron wheels squealing against the rails and the wind whipping tears from our eyes and splaying them across our cheeks.

We passed through a half dozen different neighborhoods including North Philadelphia, which looked like a post-apocalyptic nightmare where the ozone layer had opened up and scorched the earth to ruin and only the melanin in black skin had allowed for survivors. As the train made its way through and the depressed weather-torn houses with sagging roofs, rotting paint, and shattered windows loomed into view looking worse than the death camps at Auschwitz, the entire train would go silent. This was the roughest, poorest section of Philadelphia marked by hills of garbage, thigh high weeds, packs of soot covered children chasing each other through barren fields of rusted cars and occasionally shooting at one another, miniscule yards filled with trash and savage, half-starved mongrels chained to rusted fences that snarled at us as we rumbled past, and tired old men rocking on front porches while nursing bottles of wine and watching the crackwhores strut past them offering their withered and diseased bodies for less than the price of a happy meal.

The graffiti in this area was mostly gravestones with epitaphs that read “Rest In Peace” and “We Miss You” followed by the names of fallen friends and sometimes graphically illustrated murals depicting the precise manner in which their loved ones had met their end. Guns, knives, needles, and base pipes, told the tale of life’s cessation in that unimaginable hell. Often these murals included threats of retaliation. The entire cycle of violence immortalized on cracked and crumbling brick walls.

As we rode through we tried to imagine living amid that poverty which seemed many times worse than our own and found our minds unequal to the task. North Philly seemed like death not life. It was amazing that anything lived there at all and each child that made it to adulthood was like a miracle. It was inconceivable how these people could survive when most of us barely had a roof over our heads and food on our tables. Silent prayers of thanks would issue from every lip.

“There but for the grace of god go I…”

It was particularly distressing to Nikky and Warlock because they had both been born there and only Warlock’s illegal business activities kept them from tumbling headlong back into that cesspit.

Finally, the train would make its final stop and pull into the trainyard. We would all creep away before the conductor could find us; pulling out our cans of spray paint eagerly hunting for the train upon which we would make our existence omnipresent.

“They want to just tuck us away in the slums and ghettoes and forget about us. But see that’s where we come in, the graffiti artists. You go all city with some dope ass mural and now they can’t forget about you. Every time they look up at a wall, a billboard, a subway train, there you are, fuckin’ up the program.”

I wasn’t really much of a graffiti artist. While they were doing burners and wild styles with all kinds of characters in them, I was writing my name in bubble letters. Besides, bombing trains was dangerous as hell. I had already gotten blasted in the back with a shotgun filled with rock salt by one of the security guards in the trainyard and even though it didn’t do any damage it hurt like a motherfucker. A kid from around the way had fallen off and cracked his skull open trying to hop a train down to the yard. And graffiti artists were getting shot by other graffiti artists for “biting their style” almost every other day. It just didn’t seem worth it to me.

Where Nikky and I found common ground was in comic books. I had been reading comic books since I first learned to read and in fact had become such a good reader because of my love of the fantastic tales that filled those pages. I especially identified with the Incredible Hulk; a misunderstood giant constsantly persecuted by those who feared and mistrusted him because of his freakish size and strength. That’s exactly how I felt back then. At eight years old I was already five feet tall and feared by all the other kids.

Nikky and I used to sit around the house reading comic books for hours at a time and would invite other kids over to trade with us. We would steal comics from the other kids when they weren’t looking and pretty soon no one would trust us enough to trade anymore so we just started stealing them from the comic book stores. I was determined to get every Incredible Hulk comic ever made.

When Nikky and I got tired of reading comic books or didn’t have the money to buy new ones, and couldn’t steal any, we would take a trip down to Wissahickon to steal dirt bikes. Nikky rode on my handle bars all the way down through the park and into the suburbanesque white neighborhood on the other side. Over there it was easy pickings. The White kids in Wissahickon didn’t even bother to lock their bikes up and often left $500 designer frames lying on the front lawn. When we spotted one Nikky would jump off my handle bars, snatch up the bike, and ride it as fast as he could all the way back to the hood with me following him running interference in case we were chased. Most of the time we would sell the bikes, but sometimes we would keep them, at least until we came upon something better.

Nikky came up with the idea of decorating our bikes with the silver caps off the air valves on car tires. We would steal them and put them on our bike tires. We got busted for doing that more than anything else. We even got a beating from Mr. Steeltower, a huge gorilla of a man who lived next door with his three equally gargantuan and gruesome sons. All of them were well over six feet tall and two hundred and fifty pounds, black as burnt butter, with greasy Jeri curls. They looked like death on steroids.

We knelt down beside the glossy black Cadillac Biarritz that carried the tremendous Steeltower family through the hood like royalty. Nikky unscrewed the cap on the front tire and I had already removed the one from the back when I heard the wounded cat whine of the rusted screen door opening and froze like a cat caught in the headlights of a speeding semi-truck.

“You boys get up from there! What was ya’ll tryin’ to steal my rims? You know how much those things cost?” His voice was deep and gravely like the purr of a full-grown male lion. I imagined I could feel it vibrating through the asphalt up through the souls of my feet. Instinctively I braced for an ass-kicking.

“Uh-uh! We wasn’t doin’ nothing.” We replied in chorus, rising from behind the car with guilt smeared conspicuously across our faces. The walrus-like girth of Steeltower filled the doorway like a great living shadow. His massive bulk stretched the seams of a bluish green shark-skin suit. A white cotton polo-shirt open at the neck revealing a thin gold chain hung with an ornate cross covered his bloated stomach and his oily Jeri curl was mashed beneath a white sweat-stained Panama hat. In his hands he clutched a long shotgun that did not divert for an instant from its target—the center of my chest. It had never even occurred to us to take the rims. Who knows what we could have gotten for them.

“What you got in your hands, boy?”

We opened our hands and the shiny silver air valve caps plinked on the concrete at our feet.

“Ya’ll put those right back where you got them from.”

As we bent down to replace the caps we didn’t notice Steeltower creeping up behind us removing his yard-long belt from its loops until his shadow stifled the sunlight and the first stinging lashes fell across our back and shoulders.

We froze for a second, cringing against the tires of the shiny new Caddy while the belt whipped searing welts on our skin. Finally our brains kicked into gear and we ran like the devil was on our tail.

“Damn kids! Ya’ll just let me catch ya foolin’ with my car again and see what happens to you little niggas!” he yelled after us. He could rest assured that that would never happen.

We sat on the steps of the corner store comparing welts and talking about the hell our parents would visit upon Mr. Steeltower when we told them how he had beaten us with his belt in the middle of the street.

“My Mom will shoot that fat muthafucka right in his fat-ass!”

“When Warlock finds out he’ll probably get so mad he’ll cut his damn balls off!”

Nikky didn’t talk about his parents. They were both drunks and drug addicts who sat around their musty old house drinking MD 20/20 and smoking weed all day.

I told my mom and Nikky told his brother, but nobody did anything. Steeltower was a notorious gun and numbers runner and all three of his sons were killers with rap sheets a mile long. Nobody messed with that family. When I got home I found out that Steeltower had already been there and spoken to my mother. When I opened the door she was standing there with her hands on her hips balled into tight little fists. The cords in her neck were bulging and the vein in the center of her forehead was pulsating. I wound up getting a second beating far more vicious than the first.

“You know that man almost shot you?” she asked as the sole of her shoe worked savagely across my thighs, back, and buttocks.

“The only reason he didn’t pull the trigger was cause he recognized you as my child! Now you march your smart ass back over there and apologize to that man!”

She smacked the shoe against my crying pleading body a few more times; holding me tightly by the arm with her nails leaving half-moons in my bicep as she jerked me around to keep me off balance and open more areas for attack. She was nearly out of breath when she finally released me to comply with her command.

I did as I was told and was surprised to find a grinning friendly Mr. Steeltower who eagerly accepted my apology. He was impressed with my politeness and humility in a time where kids my age were already robbing old folks for their social security checks though he was no doubt aware that all my cockiness had been beaten out of me prior to coming over there. Incredibly, he slipped me a five-dollar bill and told me to come see him if I ever needed anything. I left with a newfound respect for the man. I later found out he was my grandmother’s sometime lover.

Nikky and I were always getting into shit. We used to go down to the Woolworth’s on Germantown and Chelten Ave and steal Hot Wheels cars from the toy section.

In our neighborhood Hot Wheels cars were a sort of status symbol. Since nobody around the way actually paid for them, how many cars you possessed was a sign of how accomplished a thief you were. Nikky and I had well over a hundred between us. We would spend hours racing the cars down hills and betting on which ones would make it to the bottom first.

Once we walked into the Woolworth’s with the pads from our BMX bikes in our hands. We had intended on unwrapping a few Hot Wheels cars and hiding them inside the pads. We had racked up about six cars each and were on our way out when I noticed the rumpled old, gray-haired, security guard, with the skin-tight high-water uniform on, circling around to intercept us at the exit. I knew he was going to ask to check our pads so I decide to pull a Bugs Bunny move on him. I handed both pads to Nikky and just as the security guard walked up I asked him what time it was. As unbelievable as it sounds, the fool actually stopped and looked at his watch. Nikky slipped safely out the door with the contraband and I stood and waited for the security guard to reply.

“Four o’clock.” The grizzled old rent-a-cop answered and I smiled politely, thanking him for the info, and walked out the door leaving him scratching his head and trying to convince himself that he hadn’t just been scammed by an eight-year-old. Nobody likes to think they’re an idiot even when all evidence points to that conclusion.

Winters in G-town were even more fun than the summers, but only marginally less violent. Right after the first large snowfall the entire neighborhood would rush down to Wissahickon Park to race sleds and inner tubes down Tommy Hill. Tommy Hill was about the length of two city blocks inverted at a seventy-degree angle and dotted with trees and bushes both large and small. My mother would smother me in endless layers of clothing, fill a thermos with hot chocolate, jam my head into a ski mask, earmuffs, and a scarf, which I would get rid of within minutes of leaving the house, and send me off with my rusted old Red Flyer sled to brave the hill.

Beneath my goosedown winter coat, I would be wrapped in Long John underwear, two pairs of pants, a T-shirt, a shirt, two sweaters, and a nylon jacket with a fleece lining. My feet were stuffed into two pairs of socks and plastic bags to keep the moisture out and then packed into huge snow boots that looked like something you’d wear for a walk on the moon. Off I’d speed towards Tommy Hill and there I’d stay ’til I lost all feeling in my extremities and Mom would have to hold my hands and feet under hot water while I screamed and cried as feeling returned in an onrush of white hot pain.

The hill looked like a swarm of ants on an ice-cream cone as kids from all over raced down the hill. The White kids who actually lived in that neighborhood had long ago been driven off after several violent confrontations with some of G-town’s hardest. The few that did venture out were quickly relieved of any valuable possessions and sent home with bloody noses, missing teeth, busted lips, or blackened eyes, and sometimes worse. G-town had staked its claim.

Freezing winds scoured our faces, cutting into our skin like icy razor blades as we recklessly careened down the hill catching air and landing in sprays of snow. Inevitably someone crashed into a tree and had to be taken to the hospital, but as soon as the ambulance left we would all start flying down the hill again; careful to steer around the red snow.

It was rumored that the hill had been named after a kid who’d been killed sledding down it a hundred years ago. I couldn’t remember anyone ever dying while we were out there, but bruises, lacerations, and concussions were an everyday thing.

One day during Christmas vacation, after spending hours racing up and down the hill, we were walking home when a bunch of kids who were throwing snowballs at cars on Green Street decided that we would make better targets.

“Get those muthafuckas over there!” one kid yelled and suddenly the sky became a blizzard of frozen projectiles. The snowballs were mostly slush and we were soaking wet in seconds. A short stocky kid with snot running down his face like a fat black soda fountain with a leak picked up a big piece of ice and threw it, hitting Nikky in the face, cutting his lip and bloodying his nose. Nikky started crying and sat down in the snow holding his face. The rest of the kids zeroed in on him and began bombing him with snowballs as he wailed and sobbed and screamed for them to stop. I ran across the street breathless with rage and dove on the short kid. I was pounding the kid’s head into the snow when the other boys started kicking and punching me, dragging me off of the snotty nosed boy.

There were more than eight of them and fists and feet struck me from all angles as I swung blindly trying to connect with anything. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Nikky rush over and fight his way through to my side. They were surprised by Nikky’s attack and for a moment it almost looked like they would retreat, then one of them tackled Nikky and they all started stomping and kicking him as he struggled to get up. They ran off and left us both bleeding in the snow freezing half to death. Worst of all, they had stolen our sleds.

I looked at Nikky and he looked at me. We both looked like shit. Black eyes and busted lips. We started to laugh. At that moment we knew that we were truly the best of friends. I had gotten his back when he had needed it and he had gotten my back in return and even though we had both gotten our asses kicked it had been worth it to learn the depths of our friendship.

We never went back to Tommy Hill after that. I couldn’t afford a new sled and even though Warlock would have given Nikky anything he wanted, he wouldn’t have gone to the hill without me. It was all for the best anyway. A week later they found some Muslim lady buried in the snow up there. She had been pregnant and someone had torn her baby out of her womb. They said it looked like the killer had used his bare hands and teeth to rip out her unborn child. I thought that had to be bullshit. No one was that sick.

— | — | —

Chapter 4

“Hell is other people.”

—Jean Paul Sartre

««—»»

In school I was always getting into trouble. Even though I made good grades, got perfect scores on all my tests, and did most of my homework, I was constantly getting into fights.

Anyone who dissed me would wind up with missing teeth and because of my raggedy clothes I got dissed a lot until they saw how fearsomely I fought. They started calling me Snap because of my bad temper. Even my teachers called me Snap. My viciousness even caused Nikky to distance himself from me. We hung out around the way, but at school he treated me like a wet food stamp. I understood where he was coming from though. I would have preferred to be anonymous and invisible like him, but he wasn’t getting teased like I was. Warlock saw to it that Nikky was never out of fashion. He never wore the same jeans two days in a row. His clothes didn’t fit too tight because he’d grown out of them before the income tax return check came. His shoes didn’t have holes in them and his jacket didn’t have the name of the kid who’d owned it before your mother purchased it from the goodwill written on the inside collar. But for me, with my exhausted retrograde wardrobe, life would have been unbearable if I didn’t hold the entire school in fear. Even still their whispered insults shadowed me through the halls as they hurled them silently at my back.

When Tank and Huey transferred to our school, everyone began trying to instigate a war of the hoodrats. They couldn’t wait to see us get that shit on.

“Did you see that big muthafucka from North Philly? You know him and Snap ‘gonna wind up thumpin’. I hope he kicks that crazy nigga’s ass! Snap think can’t nobody beat his ass. I can’t wait to see Tank get a hold of ’im.” Every hallway in school echoed with some variation of this same refrain. I wanted to squeeze each and every one of their voiceboxes shut to keep that noise out of my head.

After hearing so much about these new kids from North Philadelphia’s notorious Richard Allen projects, I wanted to see what they were all about. I had already subjugated the entire 5^th grade with ease and I wanted to know if their really were two kids that were my match. At that time I considered myself unbeatable. I was eager to fight these two fools and get it over with. They had already tangled with several guys whom I had fought in the past and beaten them just as easily as I had and to be truthful it was making me kind of anxious. When the day finally came it was like high noon in a spaghetti western.

I was on my way to lunch when the biggest blackest kid I could ever remember seeing lumbered towards me. He was at least 5’5” tall and about 160lbs (which was gigantic for a ten-year-old) and as black as death and sin. He was too solid to be called fat. He seemed to be stuffed full of sand or rocks like my dad’s old handmade punching bag and even though his gut stuck out about five inches in front of him nothing on him jiggled. His hair was all nappy and uncombed though he had one of those big wooden brushes sticking out of his back pocket.

His clothes were outdated, ill-fitting, and dirty just like mine, but you could tell he didn’t give a fuck just as easily as you could tell that I did. His eyes were big and round with heavy eyelids that covered half his eyes making him look constantly tired or bored. As he lumbered toward me down the hall I could hear his loud ponderous breathing reminding me of the way the shark Darryl had caught once on a deep sea fishing trip had sounded before he clubbed it to death and threw it back overboard. I remember feeling sorry for the shark that day, but right then I kind of wished I had a club myself.

In “The G,” and I suspect in every ghetto in Philly if not the entire East Coast, when two males pass each other on the street or in a hallway a contest of wills begins. It’s called who will yield and move out of the other one’s way. First we look into each other’s eyes to assess the degree of threat. If the guy looks away or smiles at you then you hog the entire sidewalk and make him walk on the grass or in the street. But if he mad-dogs you like this big angry thug was doing to me and doesn’t give up any ground then it’s on and you have to choose whether to be a bitch and back down or be a man and fight. Sometimes you both look at each other and mutually decide that you’re too evenly matched and silently consent to both yield a little ground each so that you may pass without bumping shoulders. The entire “contest” takes seconds and happens dozens of times a day, but only rarely results in a fight. There are only so many alpha males and most of the betas know their place. But when Tank came swaggering down the hallway we both knew that neither of us would back down. For no good reason than that it had become my instinct to fight, I put myself even more directly in his path and gave him my hardest look. We slammed into each other chest to chest.

“Nigga is you crazy bumpin’ into me! I should kick your fuckin’ ass!” Tank bellowed in a voice that sounded way too deep to have come from a kid. He put both his hands on my chest and shoved hard. At first I was amazed and didn’t quite know what to do. It had been a long time since anyone had treated me that way. There seemed to be no fear in his heart at all. I stared at him as if I had discovered a new species, then he played himself by pushing me again instead of just flat out punching me. This muthafucka wasn’t taking me seriously and was gonna try and embarrass me like some bitch before kicking my ass. It fucked me up cause back then I was the baddest brotha on the block and definitely the baddest thing at that little school. Even the junior high school kids knew that if you fucked with me you’d better protect your neck ’cause I would more than likely be back to stick a blade in it. The only people who didn’t know what a terror I was, was Mom, my grandmother and Tank and his brother Huey.

Tank thought he was hard coming from North Philly and all. The brothas down there think everybody else is soft ’cause they ain’t on welfare and their moms ain’t on crack. But even though we had marginally nicer homes and better schools in G-town, we were still just as poor, just as desperate, and just as mean, and many of us were on welfare and had parents who were hitting the pipe as hard as them fools in the projects. We were every bit as angry, as bitter and hopeless, as jaded and hardened and lost. In my mind I was going to prove all of that with one punch.

Tank shoved me a second time and I dipped and threw an uppercut to his solar-plexus with all the strength I could muster, a Tyson punch, thrusting upwards with my legs so that I nearly rose off the floor myself. I knew that at 5’3” and less than 100lbs there was no way I was going to knock the much bigger kid out going toe to toe with him but I knew just where to hit to cause the most damage. I figured I could knock the wind out of him and then fuck his shit up while he struggled to catch his breath. He bent over with the punch and I kicked him right in the face trying to shove my worn-out Nike right into his mouth and succeeding in splitting his lip open and cracking a tooth. The huge kid staggered backwards holding his face and I kicked him in his gut like the SWAT team kicking down the door to a drug warehouse, putting all my weight behind it like I was trying to drive right through him. An explosion of air came out of his lungs and he went down on one knee gasping and wheezing as he fought to replenish the oxygen I’d just deprived him of. I leapt on him and began pummeling him with my tiny fists.

There were other kids in the hall now, but I was only peripherally aware of them. They were just shadows dancing and raging at the edge of my sight which was filled only with the tremendous ten-year-old.

“Get ’im! Kill that dirty mutherfucker! Fuck his shit up!”

I didn’t know who they were cheering for and didn’t care.

Tank lashed out blindly trying to fend off my attack and caught me right between the eyes with the back of his fist. Blue lights flashed in my skull and I staggered backwards. That’s when Tank got up. I’d never seen a kid come back after a beating like that and my eyes widened in surprise and fear. It was like watching Micheal Meyers or Jason Vorhees rise up after being stabbed, shot, and burned to death. It seemed supernatural and damn did he look pissed.

He charged me and swung a right at my head. I leaned back to avoid the blow and he swung a left uppercut into my gut. Just to pay me back I supposed. Air evacuated my lungs in a great rush and my eyes teared up. The whole world seemed to shift as pain overwhelmed my senses. It took everything I had to remain standing. I turned away from him and he punched me in the back so hard I thought my spine would snap. Another blow struck me in the back of the head and the light bulbs flashed in my skull once more.

I wanted to black out. My body wanted to sink to the floor and succumb to the painlessness of dreams, but instead I kicked at his unprotected head with some fake-ass Bruce Lee move as he charged me again and shocked myself by connecting, catching him on the ear and knocking him face first into the wall. There was a sickening wet “Smack!” and a great splatter of blood sprayed across the wall. This big, black, mean-ass thug screamed when he saw his own blood and ran past me, down the hall, to the principle’s office. The motherfucker was going to drop dime on me.

In no mood to face the principle, I decided to skip out. I pushed past all the spectators who had gathered to watch the gladiatorial games and slammed through the fire door setting off alarms and not giving a fuck.

I started running and was halfway home when I realized that I couldn’t go home at noon without my grandmother getting suspicious and calling the school. So I took a detour and went to the library. It was the only place you could go during school hours and not get questioned.

Northwest Regional Library was one of the newest and nicest libraries in the city. It amazed me that it was right in the middle of Germantown. In the children’s section they had a big wooden sculpture of a dragon that was almost twenty feet long and upstairs they had computers and thousands of books. I loved this place.

I checked out a book on Shaka Zulu and sat enthralled for hours reading about how he’d nearly taken over all of Africa. I felt as if I had been born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. On the plains of Africa I felt like they would have appreciated my skills, my ferocity, my aggression. I would have become a great general in Shaka’s army or maybe even a king myself. Here, I was just a thug who would no doubt wind up in prison someday.

I read the entire book in a few hours and then made my way back over to the shelves and picked up a book I’d never seen before, but whose title called out to me just as it was meant to do. It was called “A Message to the Black Man in America” by some cat named Elijah Muhammed. I checked it out and started reading it as I took the bus back home.

It was almost five o’clock in the evening when I made it home. I walked past all the kids playing in the street and all anyone was talking about was how I’d kicked Tank’s ass and how his older brother Huey had been around looking for me. I had only read the first ten pages of Elijah Muhammed’s book, but already there were thoughts in my head of black unity and how the social diseases of poverty, racism, and oppression had corrupted our brains and made us self-destructive creatures who fed on one another turning all our rage and hatred inward rather than turning that aggression outward towards our oppressors. Old habits die hard though.

“Shit, I don’t give a fuck! I’ll kick his ass too! Them North Philly niggas ain’t shit!” I said boldly and loudly. Too loudly in fact ’cause my grandma overheard me.

“Is that you cussin’ like that Malik? Boy, you’d better get your fresh behind in here ’fore I take this belt to your hide!” Sometimes I wished she was half deaf like most other grandmothers. But at forty-seven years old she was the youngest grandmother I knew.

“Did you hear me boy? Get your bad behind in here! I want you to clean up that filthy room of yours before your momma gets home and haves a fit!”

“Damn!” I said under my breath as I skulked up the steps and into the house.

Grandma could talk real mean sometimes, but it was all a front. Deep down she was as soft and sweet as cotton candy. She just yelled when she was lonely, just to get attention. I don’t know why my mother couldn’t see that. It was probably ’cause she was so stressed out from working all day and, in her words, “Takin’ shit from white folks.”

I went inside and Grandma was all over me as soon as I stepped through the door.

“Where’ve you been boy?”

“I went to the library after school.”

I put the book down on the kitchen table and Grandma’s eyes zeroed in on it then seemed to stay fixed on the book. She stared back at me in shock like I’d just set a decapitated head on the table instead of a book.

“You got that at the library?” She asked.

“Yeah.”

“Who told you about this book?” she asked.

“Nobody. I just saw it sitting on the shelf and it looked interesting.”

“Mmmhmm.” She replied and then turned away from both me and the book.

“Well, get upstairs and clean that nasty room of yours.”

I went to work on her.

“But, I’m starving, Grandma. Do I have to wait for Mom to get home to get something to eat?”

“You didn’t look that hungry when you was outside runnin’ that filthy mouth of yours.”

“Them boys was sayin’ some kid from North Philly was gonna beat me up.”

“Who’s gonna beat you up, boy? What have you done now?” There was worry and concern on her face. It wasn’t just me getting into a fight that scared her. It was that around our way fights had a way of turning deadly.

“I ain’t did nothin’. This kid just wants to fight me ’cause he wants to prove he can beat me. I don’t even know the kid.” That seemed to relax her a little. This was just typical adolescent machismo and not the type of thing kids got murdered for. It was much better than her knowing that I’d trashed the kid’s brother and he was out looking for revenge. She’d have worried herself sick if she knew that. Just like I was doing.

“Well, ain’t nobody gonna beat you but me if you don’t clean up that room. Ain’t nobody gonna lay a finger on you as long as I’m around.”

I loved hearing her say it, but even she knew that parents couldn’t protect me from everything. That life was bigger and stronger than Mom or Dad or even Grandma. Some kids make it all the way through college before they learned those lessons. But those kids never lived in the ghetto.

“Do I have to clean my room now? I’m hungry grandma.” I made the most pitiful face I could muster and could see grandma’s resolve melting like an ice-cream castle.

“Lord, child you gonna be the death of me. Don’t them people feed you at school?”

“That food is nasty! I don’t eat that mess!”

“Well, you sure got fine tastes for a little boy with no job and no money. Get in there and do your homework while I make you a sandwich. And don’t tell me you ain’t got none ’cause I know better.”

“Oh, alright.”

I picked the book up off the table and marched with it into the family room. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Grandma’s eyes latch onto the book and follow it out of the room. Now I was really curious. What was it about this little book that made her so afraid?

Grandma went shuffling into the kitchen to scrape the meat off some left-over chicken legs to make me a sandwich and I sat down at the huge ornate dining room table that would have been a gorgeous antique in a nicer home but in ours, covered with cheap plastic placemats that smelled like airplane glue, it was just another piece in a cluttered maze of junk.

I opened the book by Elijah Muhammed and began to read about Dr. Yacub and how the white man was the devil. I laughed as I thought about it. All the white boys I knew were far too soft to be devils. They were more like those bitch-ass cherubs in the renaissance paintings at the art museum. Then again I hadn’t been a slave nor had I been forced to deal with the degradation of the Jim Crow laws as most Black people did back when this book was written. Poverty was the only burden that Black people today had to bear and it seemed that much of it was our own doing. Dropping out of school, having babies at 15 years-old, getting thrown in prison before we could legally vote, voiding our minds with drugs, men abandoning their families to start new ones over and over again without supporting any of the children they produced. I didn’t see the devil involved in any of that. I saw our own self-destructive ignorance. Even my own family seemed to have a fear of success, afraid to risk everything to go for their dreams, but rather content to stay in the ghetto and complain about what they didn’t have.

Even Grandma could have gone back to school if she wanted to. I’d heard of lots of middle-aged people who went to college to try to better themselves. Every day I heard my mother and grandmother complaining about the depressed economy and non-existent job market in Philadelphia, but yet they stayed here suffering, too afraid to leave the comfort and familiarity of the goddamned block. I made a promise to myself that I was going to get the fuck out of Philly the first chance I got. I tossed the book aside and started my math homework.

All of a sudden I heard loud voices cussin’ and arguing outside. One of the voices was speaking in an almost indecipherable Jamaican patois’ and the other was speaking in the most exaggerated ghetto slang I’d ever heard. I could barely understand either of them.

“What! Nigga, what! You betta act like you know and stop slangin’ that shit on my turf ’cause I know you don’t want no drama from me, fool!”

“Go on bloodclot! Lickle peckerwood wannabe! Jah Warrior say ’ow tings go down ’ere and ’e say ya naw can claim nut’ing in G-town. Ya wan’ sell in G-town ya ’ave ta pay! Dis ’ere Jah Warrior territory! Now go on way from ’ere for I take it in my mind ta stop ya breat’ing!”

“You know who you steppin’ to fool? This here is Scratch! I ain’t nuthin’ ta play with, son! I ain’t nuthin’ nice! You think shit is sweet up in this piece? You think you can run up in here and take my shit?”

I had run to the window when I heard the dread refer to his adversary as a peckerwood because I just couldn’t imagine a white boy in our neighborhood, talking cold street, and stepping to one of those ruthless Jamaican dealers like he was some bitch.

Just as I parted the blinds enough to see the two, this tall skinny white boy in a leather Nike running suit, a thick gold “dope rope” with a gold nameplate that read “Scratch”, and more lines carved into the side of his towering block taper than Vanilla Ice, drew a big shiny automatic pistol out of his waistband while the Jamaican reached for his and blew the rasta’s dreadlocks off his head along with the greater portion of his skull. His crown of thick dreads went spinning through the air looking for a moment like some type of grisly gore-streaked Christmas tree.

I sat frozen at the window watching the emaciated scarecrow-like Jamaican whose eyes had burned like Moses slip to the ground with blood streaming out of his nostrils and ears and his brain flopping out of the top of his ruptured head. His body hit the ground with a soft thud and then a smack as his head struck the asphalt and his brains spilled out onto the street. His legs were still twitching and his fingers were clenching and unclenching. The white boy stepped up and put two more bullets into him silencing his restless corpse. I was transfixed.

It was the first time I had seen anyone die in real life and several hundred thousand TV and movie murders hadn’t prepared me. This was not killing it was butchering. It was like watching videos of deer being gunned down for sport. Yet where those videos made me sad and angry, this left me feeling hollow, helpless, vulnerable, and then suddenly excited! If this white boy could take a life away so easily than so could I! To me it was like witnessing the power of a god. Then the white boy knelt down over the bleeding carcass and did something that no god I’d ever heard of would ever have done.

A pink spaghetti-like mass of tissue oozed between the white boy’s fingers as he reached into the Rasta’s skull and scooped out his brain. I stared in shocked silence, my body shaking and the little hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, watching as he crammed the man’s brain into his mouth, gulping and swallowing like a snake swallowing a rat. I kept watching as he slid his fingers along the inner wall of Jah Warrior’s brain pan and brought two fingers dripping with blood and cerebral fluid up to his lips where he licked them clean, shuddering as if in the throws of orgasm. He smeared his face in the blood flowing from the dead guy’s head like war paint, a horrible grin scarring his features. If I’d been forced to describe Satan…that was the face I would have given him.

“Jesus Christ!”

I was terrified, but not nearly as much as I should have been. I know it seems bizarre now, but at the time I didn’t see anything at all unnatural about what he’d done. I even thought I could remember seeing something on National Geographic about a tribe in Africa that ate the brains of their enemies in order to gain their power but I couldn’t be sure. I guess I just figured that he was playin’ that crazy nigga role to build his rep and scare off witnesses and competition. Who would fuck with some crazy white boy who talked like a thug and ate motherfucker’s brains?

“Ya’ll niggas ain’t see shit! Say you saw somethin’ and see what happens! See what I do to you! See what happens to your families!”

He was standing in the middle of the street, waving his gun with one hand while wiping the blood and brainmatter from his mouth and chin with the back of his other hand.

I couldn’t believe what I had seen. I thought about the book I had just started reading and what Elijah Muhammed had said about the White man being the devil. I still wasn’t so sure about the white man being the devil but I was almost positive that this one was.

I heard my grandmother’s footsteps moving faster than I ever would have thought they could and then I felt myself being hurled to the floor. She was praying and sweating and scared. I was scared too but I was also impressed. At that moment the white boy with the big shiny gun and the cannibalistic appetite loomed larger than life. A white kid who could walk into a ghetto by his damned self and gun down a member of one of the most vicious drug gangs around, in broad daylight, and then stroll right back out unmolested and unmarred. Here was a muthafucka who didn’t give a fuck. He was obviously insane, eating a niggas brains like it was a damned cheese steak hoagie, but that type of crazy just made you more dangerous by my way of thinking. I didn’t care if he was Satan or not. I wanted to be just like him. I would be and much worse.

My mom made me stay in all night because of the shooting so I didn’t have to face Huey, but I knew there was no avoiding him at school. I was tempted to stay home but I also knew that everyone would know it was because of Huey and I didn’t want all the kids to call me a pussy. Mom still had one of Darryl’s guns around the house somewhere and with yesterday’s drama still fresh in my mind I considered confronting Huey with it. Even then the thought of murdering someone didn’t bother me one bit. I wasn’t planning on eating the nigga’s brains like that white boy but I’d damn sure peel his cap back if I had too. But I didn’t want to think of what would happen to me if I got caught. I liked the idea of walking the streets with the reputation of being a killer but I hated the idea of walking the prison yard for the rest of my life. Besides, I wasn’t certain I could find it anyway. Mom was a master at hiding things she didn’t want me to get a hold of.

As soon as I left the house the other kids walking past on their way to school all turned to look at me. Then they looked back around the corner on Duval Street at something I couldn’t see. I knew that the something was probably Huey or Tank or both of them. I steeled my nerves and stepped on down the street strolling like I was the hardest nigga on the planet.

Iesha, this little red-bone girl who lived up the street from me, came rushing up to me and grabbed my hand. I had a crush on her and she knew it, but fronted like she was naïve. I knew she liked me too, but her mom thought I was a little hoodlum so she had to keep her distance. Her mom would kick her ass at the drop of a dime, even in public. Her hand in mine sent shivers through me and when I turned to look into her light brown eyes all thoughts of Huey fled from me.

“Oh, hi Ieasha. What’s up?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Oh, I know about that shooting last night. The shit happened right in front of my crib. I watched the ambulance take the body away.” Even at ten I knew better than to admit to anyone that I had witnessed a murder. Especially when the killer was a psychotic white man who ate brains.

“No, I mean about Huey sayin’ he’s gonna kick your ass! He’s right around the corner with his brother. You should go back in the house ’fore they catch you!”

The concern and worry in her voice, the fear on her face, wounded me. Didn’t she think I could take care of myself? Shit, I ran that school and had kicked more ass than any ten kids and here she was telling me to run?

“Before they catch me? Bitch, do you see me runnin’! Ain’t no bitch ass North Philly pussy’s gonna kick my ass!”

I said it loud enough for all the kids on the block to hear along with anyone who might have been waiting around the corner, then I stormed down toward Duval Street hungry for blood. All the kids followed a few steps behind me like vultures circling carrion, leaving Iesha standing alone in the middle of the street still looking worried for me. I was going to beat this Huey kid ’til he lay bleeding at my feet for making Iesha doubt me.

The air parted reluctantly as I charged through it. It was so thick with tension that running through it was like swimming through quicksand. All that did was make me even more desperate to get it all over with. I still had not learned fear yet.

I was at the end of the block in seconds looking for the pretender who had come to usurp my crown as king of the block. I turned at Duval Street and didn’t see anyone but a bunch of second graders being walked to school by a woman too young to be any of their mothers. Just as I was about to sigh in relief and talk some trash to the other kids about scaring them off, Tank’s hulking bulk turned the corner from McCallum Street onto Duval followed by a little light-skinned kid who was almost pretty enough to be a girl.

Huey was all of 4’ 8” and no more than 90lbs. His skin was butterscotch and he had big hazel eyes with long lashes, thick bushy eyebrows that rose to sharp peaks, and curly hair that grew in an unruly bush. My grandmother later referred to him as “That high-yaller nigga with the good hair.”

When I saw him come walking down the street led by his behemoth “Little brother”, whom I’d already sent hobbling to the principle’s office the day before sniffing and crying with blood and snot dried and caked beneath his nose. I nearly burst out laughing. There was Tank with his nose all bandaged up, grinning like an idiot, walking alongside his “Big” brother who looked like you could knock him over with a few harsh words. I knew a lot of short kids who were bad as fuck but none of them were as pretty as this kid. He looked like a mark to me. I couldn’t imagine anyone who looked that feminine kicking my ass, but that just showed the limits of my imagination.

He stepped up to me and I puffed out my chest and said “So, you’re Huey, huh?” His eyes met mine and I knew I had made a mistake. I knew that this little yaller nigga was dangerous. He had eyes like Darryl had after returning from ’Nam, eyes like my uncle had when we used to visit him at Gratersford prison before he was shot by a guard, eyes like that white boy who shot that Jamaican yesterday, eyes that have seen the worst the world had to offer, eyes that had seen lots of killing, eyes that have killed. We all look like that now, but back then you didn’t see eleven year-old boys with eyes like hardened cons.

Huey didn’t say a word as he stepped up. He just kicked me right in the jaw with a move every bit as graceful and beautiful as himself. This was no Kung fu Theatre bullshit either. This little brotha new what he was doing. I felt my jaw pop and then a punch landed on the other side of it that felt like it would rip my head in two. Instantly I flew into a rage, throwing myself at the little pretty boy in a rage, but I couldn’t land a single blow.

Huey slipped and ducked and weaved, while firing counter shots in rapid combinations. My blows were wild and flailing whereas his were precise and accurate. As his punches landed again and again my rage started to give way to fear. I couldn’t even see the punches coming and once they began they were like an endless wave of kicks. Knees, elbows, and hooks. He was taking me apart. I felt myself starting to lose consciousness so I did the only thing I could at that point to save myself. I ran. Hearing the kids behind me laughing, hearing Iesha’s pained voice calling my name, hearing my father’s disappointed hiss echoing in my mind more painful and intimate than the rest. I ran home and ransacked Mom’s room looking for Darryl’s gun. If I had found it Huey and I would have never become friends. If I had found it Huey and Tank would have never become anything but dust and stench.

Grandma rushed upstairs when she heard me dismantling Mom’s room. She found me sitting in Mom’s closet with tears streaming down my face and blood and saliva drooling from my mouth, which hung carelessly open. My cheeks were swollen up like two puss-filled blisters about to rupture. She screamed and hugged me, and prayed, and dragged me to the hospital begging and praying to God all the way.

They wired my jaw shut and I adamantly refused to go back to school looking like some freak whose braces had been welded together. I stayed home reading Elijah Muhammed’s book and thinking about what I’d seen that white boy do to that Jamaican dealer. The more I thought about it the more amazing it seemed. I’d never even heard about white boys that hard. Except maybe the mafia but I didn’t think this guy was Italian. He looked too pale. And I’d never heard of anyone from the mafia eating anyone’s brains. It just didn’t add up. It didn’t make sense.

Why would someone eat a niggas brains? Was he trying to claim that Rasta’s spirit or his power like those African tribes or was he just trying to establish some kind of weird-ass rep?

It didn’t add up at all unless of course he really was some kind of demon. I kept thinking about the way his face had looked after he’d peeled that Jamaican’s cap back and scooped out Jah Warrior’s brains, all covered in blood with flesh and brain matter coating his gold teeth. His eyes had filled with something like ecstasy. There was definitely something not right about that white boy. He looked like he was possessed or something. But Elijah Muhhamed had said that all white people were demons. Did all of them do shit like that? I wasn’t sure. I just didn’t know enough about them.

I started making it a point to question every Muslim I saw about white people and that whole devil thing.

“No, brother. You got it all wrong. There ain’t no one white man walking around who’s the devil like they portray him in the white man’s bible. He ain’t got horns and tail or nothing like that. All white men are the devil. Every last one of them collectively make up that fork-tongued cloven-hoofed fiend. He is an amalgamation of evil and the white man is that evil.”

His name was Jihad Ali and he was selling bean pies by the side of the road, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and red bow-tie. His head was clean-shaven and his face was serious but friendly. He’d been only too eager to talk to me when I walked up to him with my mouth still full of wires and started asking him about white people.

“See, the white man is the original trickster, the deceiver. He was created by an evil scientist named Dr. Yaccub in order to bring down the Black man from his throne of power and enslave him. That’s why we have to separate ourselves from these devils in order for our people to rise again. As long as we are living among them we are corrupted by their evil.”

“Do they all eat niggas brains?”

“No, they don’t eat your brain literally. They are parasites that eat your soul. They eat away at you every day by making you feel like less of a human being. They keep us poor and pump our neighborhoods full of drugs and alcohol and fried foods and pork to eat away at our spirits.”

Jihad’s eyes sparkled when he talked, the way my grandma’s did when she talked about Jesus.

“Then what about what I saw?”

“Maybe it was a hallucination or maybe you had a psychic premonition or something. Maybe you had a vision of what all white people are really like underneath.”

But it wasn’t all white people. That drug dealer wasn’t the first white person I’d ever seen but he was the first one I’d ever seen who killed niggas like that and ate their brains. I’d heard about the KKK and the Nazis and those White folks who’d brought my ancestors over from Africa in slave ships. They could have all been devils. But none of them ate black folk’s brains, at least not from what I had heard. That white boy was the first white person who’d ever scared the shit out of me.

I started having nightmares about getting my head blown off and being eaten alive. I soon found myself looking suspiciously at every white person I passed. Then, when I heard about Jeffrey Dahmer getting arrested and thrown in prison for eating a bunch of Black and Hispanic kids, I started to think that maybe Jihad had been right and they were all devils. Still, it didn’t make sense to me. If they were all out there killin’ niggas and eatin’ their brains there wouldn’t be no niggas left in the world, definitely not in America. Maybe that’s why we were still the minorities despite all the fucking that went on in the ghetto? Maybe white people were killing us off and gobbling us up as fast as we could make new babies? I thought about my teachers at school and I just couldn’t imagine it. They all seemed so nice. No, there was definitely something different about that White boy.

I missed a month of school following my run in with Huey but I got that nigga back.

Even though I was staying home from school I couldn’t let the other kids think it was because I was afraid. So, the next day, I left my house early and hid in an alley on Duval street between Ambrose and Burbridge streets. I picked up half a cinder block and a big piece of lumber. I waited, watching all the kids walk by on their way to school. I listened to many of them discuss how Huey had beaten me. My rage seethed within me like something alive and dangerous. Something hungry and violent. I waited until finally I saw Huey walk by. I expected to see just him and Tank and was floored with shock and grief when I saw Iesha strolling along right beside Huey, holding hands. I raised the chunk of cinder block above my head just as he passed then I stepped out of the alley behind him and brought it down on his skull with a crack that sprayed blood into the air like a geyser.

Iesha screamed and looked at me like I was some kind of monster. I wanted to punch her right in the mouth for betraying me like that, but I hadn’t been raised to hit girls. Still, when she charged me looking like she wanted to scratch my eyes from my face, I had no choice but to push her down, though I did so as gently as I could. Tank came roaring up behind me next. I turned in time to crack him upside the head with the stick I still held. He fell and clutched his head, more to ward off further blows than to ease the pain of the first strike, but I was done. I stared at Iesha who glared back at me murderously then I dropped the stick and walked back through the alley to my house. I was upset that Iesha had chosen Huey over me and that sapped all of my rage leaving only a hollow emptiness. I had gotten a little revenge on Huey and Tank, but apparently they had still won because they had the girl I loved.

My reputation was saved. I got phone calls all day from kids congratulating me on smashing up the two brothers. Huey and Tank would have to wait a while if they wanted to retaliate now because I was still not scheduled to go back to school for a month. But there would be no retaliation. Huey and Tank’s Mom came to my house that night to speak to my Mom about her son’s busted head.

“Excuse me, Miss Black, but you have a son named Malik don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. Why do you want to know?” my mother asked, looking over the woman’s shoulder at the bandage on Huey’s head and the big welt in the center of Tank’s forehead and already guessing what had happened.

Mom towered over Huey’s mom, who was only 5’4” and gunmetal black like Tank. I wondered how such a dark complexioned woman could have a kid as light as Huey. Even though my Mom was taller, their mother had muscles like a man and even wore her hair shaved close to the scalp like a man. She looked as formidable as her off-spring and when she spoke it was low and raspy like that dry heat that wheezed out through the vents from those dusty old heating systems we all had. She was pit-bull ugly though and her eyes were mean. Looking at her I thought of what Huey had done to me and wondered if this little woman could do the same thing to my mom. I wasn’t really worried though. I knew that dad’s gun was still somewhere in the house and that Mom knew how to use it. He had shown her how.

“Your son hit my kid upside the head with a brick and he had to get thirteen stitches to sew it back up!”

“Whoa, before you start accusing my boy of anything you should know that that little heathen of yours broke my boy’s jaw and now he can’t even go to school because his mouth is wired shut and he can’t speak!”

“Who the hell are you calling a heathen?”

I sat in the living room listening to all of this and praying that the two women didn’t wind up fighting because of me.

Huey and Tank’s Mom may have been ugly but she had the body of a porn star. I’d never seen breasts so large on a woman so small. Despite the absence of a bra, they seemed to defy gravity. The nipples jabbed at the fabric of her shirt like little brown darts and half of her breasts swelled out from the sides of her tank-top. Her thin waist tapered down to wide full hips and an ass that was like a basketball that had been split into two equal parts and suspended high on her strong back. Her legs were as powerfully muscled as her arms and shoulders. She was built like an Olympic sprinter. Her deep chocolate skin glistened like it had been dipped in oil making her body look even more delicious. My young manhood strained against my jeans as I took her all in. Even with that mulish face she was beautiful. I wondered again how a woman with a face like that could have born a kid as comely as Huey.

As our mothers talked, Tank came walking up with a chocolate ice-cream bar that was dripping down his hand. He bit chunks out of it and chewed them up like a regular meal. In seconds the ice-cream was gone and Tank was licking the remaining chocolate from his pudgy fingers. It struck me then how much he looked like any other fat kid and not the fearsome bully who was terrorizing the whole school. Huey didn’t look like a kid at all though. He looked like the leading man in a romantic movie, but miniaturized.

It was weird, but, watching the two of them standing there huddled around their mother, I found myself wanting to know more about them. I wanted to be their friend. I saw how they stared at my Mom, who I knew was a stunning beauty, and I knew how I could keep our moms from fighting and maybe even establish a friendship with the two thugs. I ran outside to stand by my mother’s side.

“…I don’t care what you say my kid did. It was your kid who—”

“It was my fault.” I mumbled through my locked jaws, interrupting the two women whose tempers were just beginning to rise.

“What did you say?” my mom asked, as if unable to believe what she was hearing. It was hard for me to speak with my jaws wired shut and she was obviously hoping that she had misinterpreted my muffled mumbling.

“I started it!” I yelled and this time there was no mistaking what I had said. “I wanted to see if they were as tough as everyone was saying they were and they are. Nice kick man. That shit still hurts. You’ll have to show me how to do that sometime. I don’t want to fight them no more, but after Huey broke my jaw I couldn’t go out lookin’ like no punk. So I had to do what I had to do, you know, to maintain my rep. I didn’t really mean to hurt him.”

Everyone was amazed. Even though they could barely hear most of what I was saying, I could tell they had heard enough. Huey’s mom didn’t know what to say and the two boys looked dumbfounded. My mom was about to say something when I cut her off by stepping right up to Huey and holding out my hand.

“My fault, man. We friends now or what?”

Huey stared at my hand like something that had floated up from the bottom of a toilet. His face went from amazement to disgust then to rage and then back to wonder.

“Are you fucking kidding me, man?”

“Go ahead and shake his hand, boy! Black folks ain’t got no business fighting each other. I done told you that time and again. Now you two make up!”

Huey looked at his mother as if he was about to argue the point, but then he decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He stepped forward and shook my hand, giving me a look to let me know that if this was some kind of trick then I was as good as dead. I smiled as big as I could with my wired jaw and pumped his fist. He returned the smile with a nervous confused version that was full of unanswered questions. Savoring this minor victory, I stepped up to Tank and held out my hand. To my surprise he took my hand into his huge paw with no reservations and shook it enthusiastically, a broad grin breaking open across his face.

“Looks like I owe you an apology, Mrs. Turner.” My mother whispered bashfully.

“I’m sure there’s more to this story than either of us will ever know. No apologies needed. And call me Charlotte.”

“Then at least let me have the three of you over for supper?”

“Only if you can tell me where to find some weed in this neighborhood? I’ve only been here a couple of weeks and I don’t know nobody yet.”

“I got some shit you should try then. If you like it then I’ll tell you where you can get hooked up. Come on in.”

As unlikely as it would have seemed, a day after hospitalizing each other, Charlotte Turner and her two warrior sons became my new best friends. Our mothers soon became interchangeable. So much so that when we brought home a bad report card we were just as likely to get punished by one as the other and sometimes by both. Even though I was tall and skinny, my appetite was every bit as ravenous as Tank’s and sometimes we would eat dinner at his house and then run over to my house and have dinner again.

The three of us became the terrors of our school and neighborhood. We were like our own little gang and used to extort the kids at school for their money, sneakers, jewelry, jackets, anything we wanted and they had.

I found out why Huey looked so different from his brother too. Huey and Tank had different fathers. Tank’s dad was another victim of the war in Vietnam. He had come back from ’Nam a hopeless heroin addict who discovered, like so many others, that where the drug had been cheap and plentiful during the war, stateside it was worth more than lives. He fathered Tank just months before getting himself killed in a convenience store hold-up.

Huey never knew his Dad and his mother only knew him for a few painful hours.

Back in 1985, Charlotte Turner was snatched off the corner and whisked away in a patrol car for no apparent reason other than being a Black woman selling Black Panther newspapers at a time when militant black organizations were no longer in vogue. There were two cops in the car that day. “I Spy” cops. One white and one black.

The black cop was in the driver’s seat when they pulled the police cruiser alongside her. Charlotte stood on the corner wearing a black beret over her afro, a black leather coat and bellbottomed jeans.

“What are you supposed to be? Public Enemy or something? You trying to fight the power?”

“Fuck you pig!”

“Fuck me? No, bitch. Fuck you!”

The black cop leapt out of the car and smacked the newspapers out of her hand. The white cop slipped up behind her and jerked her arms behind her back. Charlotte fought them when they tried to handcuff her.

“What am I being arrested for? If I’m under arrest then read me my rights. I demand to know why I’m being arrested!”

“Bitch, you ain’t got no rights! Now are you going to resist?”

They began punching her and then cracking her across the thighs and buttocks with their nightsticks until her protests subsided. They nearly broke her arm getting the handcuffs on, twisting it behind her back and wedging a nightstick between her shoulder and elbow then wrenching up on it until she cried out. When she screamed and kicked the white officer pulled the club out from behind her and cracked her across the face with it. Her left eye still droops from that blow.

Once cuffed, he slid her limp bleeding body further into the vehicle and slid in beside her. He slammed the door and ordered the Black cop to drive off. Instead of driving to the police station they drove down to the train station at the end of Tulpehocken Street and took turns raping her while the other held her down.

Charlotte remembers looking up while the white cop was grunting and groaning inside her, poisoning her womb with his vile seed, and seeing the other cop, who looked like he could have been a relative, holding her arms over her head and urging the white cop on to a faster climax so that he could have his turn. When both of them had spent themselves inside of her, they raped her again, with their nightsticks. They then threw her exhausted body onto the railroad tracks assuming she wouldn’t have the strength to drag herself to safety before the train came to finish the job they had begun. But Charlotte had the strength and she passed that strength on to the son they’d planted in her belly, Huey, the son of her rapist, who she named after Huey Newton the Supreme Servant of the Black Panther Party who he remarkably resembled. She also passed on her newfound passion for the martial arts and her hatred of anything white. When I talked to her about what Elijah Muhammed said in his book about the White man being the devil she was quick to agree. I was smart enough to know that her opinion was biased though.

Huey was a shy skinny kid who was so pretty you would have thought he was queer if he wasn’t so damned spooky. The kid never smiled. He was like a man trapped inside a boy’s body. Whereas Tank looked like a pro-wrestler in miniature, Huey looked like he should have had a guitar in his hands rather than a knife or a gun. Everyone our age was scared to death of Huey and with good reason.

By the time we all became friends, Huey had already killed another kid in a fight and had just barely avoided juvenile detention, squeaking by on a self-defense plea. His Jui-Jitsu instructor had helped by testifying that Jui-Jitsu was strictly a defensive art and only works to counter attacks. No one else in the courtroom knew enough about Martial Arts to notice that the moves he’d used on the kid had not come from Jui-Jitsu but rather from Muay Thai kickboxing, a brutal offensive art. Luckily, his Muay Thai instructor had not been present to testify.

The more I got to know Huey the more I realized how lucky I had been to have escaped our fight with just a broken jaw. He’d been known to break people’s arms and legs in fights. Who knows what might have happened if I hadn’t run away. The only time I ever saw Huey smile was when I asked him what he might have done to me that day.

I pitied Huey as much as I admired him. He seemed to be perfectly bred for the streets. He was cold and hard, so tormented by the demons in his soul that the horrors on the streets couldn’t phaze him. He walked around like he was just barely aware of the ground under his feet. Even when he was fighting it was like he was barely interested in what he was doing. His eyes always had that far-away look.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him afraid, but then I can’t ever really remember seeing him happy either. Anger or indifference seemed to be the only emotions he was capable of. Most of my viciousness back then was done mostly just to stay ahead of him. I mean, I couldn’t have fools more afraid of him than me. So, where Huey was fast, clean, and efficient, I was cruel and creative and would brutalize and torture anyone who fucked with me in the most gruesome ways I could think of. Tank once threw up watching me cut the ears off a fifteen year-old boy who had beaten and robbed this little retarded kid named Nate who wasn’t even quite nine yet. I was twelve. That was the same year we met Scratch face to face and also the year my father came back.

— | — | —

Chapter 5

“The poor have become our creators.

The black. The thoroughly ignorant.

Let the combination of morality

And inhumanity begin…”

—Amiri Baraka,

“Short Speech to My Friends”

««—»»

Mom and Grandma were fighting a lot around that time. My mom had started dating again and my Grandma was none too pleased about that. She would call her a slut and say she neglected me. I guess I was partially to blame for it; getting in trouble so much and always bugging my grandmother for snack money, insisting that I was starving. My mom was miserable and I think she went out just to get away from Grandma and maybe even from me too. Whenever she tried to stay home and do what Grandma wanted it was even worse.

“What kind of job you got that you gotta leave heah at six o’clock in the morning and don’t get back ’til six o’clock at night, then still have enough energy to run the streets all night?”

“I don’t run around in the streets all night.”

“Well you damned sure ain’t here taking care of your responsibilities! That boy of yours is half starved all the time. In the streets all hours of the day and night with no supervision. You know what goes on in them streets? If it wasn’t for me you’d probably find him dead somewhere or locked up or on drugs. But I ain’t his mama. That’s your job! People gonna say the boy’s some kind of hoodlum, in the streets all the time, and you know what they gonna say about you. The way you run around it’s no wonder his daddy left.”

“His daddy ain’t leave! You know damn well that I left Darryl and you know why! Malik is well fed and well supervised he just fools you into giving him more money so he can buy junk food that he knows I don’t want him havin’. And the only one who questions my ability to raise a child is you. If it was up to you I’d still be getting my ass kicked by Darryl and then you’d have something to say about that!”

It would go on like that for hours until Mom would finally call one of her boyfriends and disappear for the night. Then one night there was a knock on the door.

“Baby? It’s me. Let me in. We have to talk.”

It was Darryl, my father. He was back and he wanted us back with him. He moved around the corner from us and came by everyday bringing Mom money and flowers and jewelry. He even brought toys for me. Pretty soon, under pressure from Grandma, Mom forgave him and we moved back in with him under promises that there would be no more beatings or drinking. His promises held for about three weeks.

When the beatings started this time they were far more vicious and didn’t just accompany the flashbacks. Anything could bring his rages on. He said that if we tried to leave him this time he would kill us all. Everytime he hit her I would run to get the knife, but I would remember how hard he had struck me last time and fear would sieze me. I would just stand there waving the sharp blade threatening and screaming at the top of my lungs.

“Stop hurtin’ my Momma!”

But I was afraid to attack him. I felt like a coward and could hardly look at either of them in the morning. I couldn’t look at my mom because I had failed her and not at Darryl because I hated him and wished him dead. Huey and Tank knew all about it. They had even been spending the night a couple of times when Darryl had flipped.

Once he kicked both of them out of the house in their pajamas in the dead of winter and their mother had to come pick them up at one o’clock in the morning. She was pissed but knew better than to say anything to Darryl. I never spent the night over at their house because I was afraid to leave Mom alone with Darryl. I was afraid I’d come home to find her tied upside down with her brains leaking out of her ears.

Huey understood. Huey and I used to sit around for hours planning ways to kill the mutherfucker. Huey seemed to take the beatings as hard as I did and was probably the only kid on the block besides myself who didn’t idolize the princely black lion that was my father. Huey and Tank had both begun to look at my mother as if she was their mom too. I guess I looked at Charlotte the same way. We were like siblings and they reacted to me and my mother’s pain as if it were their own.

“I’m glad I don’t have a father.” Huey said to me one day, “No one should have to be forced to grow up with that. It’s a shame that women have to marry men. Men only hurt them. That’s all men are good for is destroying things and hurting people. Us too. That’s all we’re good for and when we get older it will only get worse.”

Huey was always saying deep shit like that. Shit that makes you think, makes you wonder, and, more often than not, makes you sad.

“It doesn’t always have to be like that. You see good dads on TV. I think white kids have good fathers don’t they? Rich kids maybe?”

“Nope. That’s why it’s on TV. Right next to Spiderman and Barney the talking dinosaur. Because that shit is just a fantasy.”

Huey was at my house the day Darryl snapped and tried to murder my mom. It wasn’t another flashback, just a fit of pure meanness. He found some cyanide capsules and tried to force my Mom to take them.

“You gonna try and leave me bitch! I’ve given you everything, you and that bastard kid of yours!”

He punctuated every sentence with another blow to my mother’s skull.

“Everything you wanted! Everything I had! I gave you everything and you wanna try and leave me? You ain’t goin’ nowhere. You hear me? You ain’t leavin’ here alive!”

“Please, baby, I ain’t goin’ nowhere! Nigga, I ain’t playin’! Don’t you hit me no more!”

She fought him hard this time, biting and clawing at his back, punching and kicking when she could get an arm or a leg free, but just like always, he threw her to the floor and sat on top of her. His knees were in her chest. He had her jaw gripped in his huge tarantula-like hands and was trying to force the pills down her throat.

“Bitch, I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, that little pussy-ass son of yours, and myself. I’ll kill us all before I let you get out of here.”

I ran and got the carving knife. Huey was right behind me. I pulled it out of the kitchen drawer and then ran into my parent’s bedroom. Then I froze. I stood there like a fool waving the blade and yelling at Darryl to stop, watching as he attempted to murder the only thing in this world, besides my grandma, that I had ever loved. Watching as he forced poison into her mouth. The only thing in this world that had ever loved me back, that had ever made me feel safe and happy.

I saw one of the pills slowly making its way into my mother’s mouth as he brutally pried her jaws apart and my vision narrowed until it was like I was watching the whole thing through a keyhole. Slowly the light began to fade and I felt my body go limp. I was losing consciousness. I felt small hands slip the blade from my hands just before my head hit the carpet. I wanted to see who the hands belonged to, but even as I fell my eyes would not leave my mother and my periphery vision was gone.

Those tiny hands entered my miniscule field of vision in slow motion. Tiny light brown hands raising a knife high into the air above a tiny light brown head with curly brown hair. The hands rose and fell and rose and fell. Each time they rose a wave of liquid red followed the blade in an arc that flew from the metal and spattered the walls. The hands rose and fell again and again until they were no longer golden brown. Until they were the blackest red I had ever seen, slick and shiny like crimson oil.

Just before my mind shut down completely I thought to myself, “Huey was right. All men are good for is destroying things and hurting people. Even us.”

Then I dreamt, of concentration camps and jungles set ablaze with napalm. Darryl was burning in my dream. He was burning alive in the jungle. I saw him die twice that night.

The cops thought I had killed Darryl, but there was no evidence linking me to the crime and we never told them about Huey being there that night. They knew about the beatings so, when they ran into a dead end in their investigation, they just figured Darryl had gotten what he deserved and closed the book.

I tried to confess to the murder, but so much evidence pointed away from me, including my mom’s own testimony that someone else had broken in and stabbed him to death, that no one believed me and those who did couldn’t prove it. The cops looked down at me like I was stupid and pitiful and when they spoke to me it was in patronizing voices that they probably thought were soothing.

“I’m sorry kid, but if you had killed your dad you’d have blood all over you. I know you probably wanted to kill him though. I know if I was you I would have wanted to.”

I cried. I wept so long and so loud that I started having an asthma attack. I didn’t even know I had asthma until then. As much as I wanted to accept the blame for ending Darryl’s life it was denied me. Deep down I resented Huey for taking that away from me. I was grateful to him for saving my mother’s life and ending her misery, but I hated him for denying me the chance to kill the bastard myself. Yet, somehow, Darryl’s murder still drew us all closer. Secrets have a way of doing that sometimes. After that, more than ever, we were like brothers. And each year brought us even closer together. I wish now that they had never met me. They would have been better off and maybe Tank would still be alive.

— | — | —

Chapter 6

“…The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.”

—W.E.B.Du Boi, “The Souls of Black Folk”

««—»»

1999. It was almost the end of summer and every kid I knew in that neighborhood was piled up on Huey’s porch, joking, bullshiting about bitches we’d never met, jumpshots we never really made, and fights that we never won, drinking Kool Aide, Colt 45, and passing around a bottle of MD 20/20 when Huey’s mom wasn’t looking.

It seemed like the entire neighborhood turned fourteen that month one birthday party after the other. In our minds we were men now and it seemed like we should have had better things to do than sit around getting drunk, but I was at a loss as to what. I looked from face to face noticing the shadows of mustaches creeping beneath noses that just a year ago seemed to have been still dripping with snot. I listened to the deep bass that now replaced the child-like tenor that had been there before and I kept wondering what kind of orgy must have gone down the year I was conceived that had led to so many women getting pregnant around the same couple of weeks.

Warlock was already blunted when he got there and the pungent musk of stale weed exuded from his pores in a great cloud that was giving us all a contact high. His homeboy Terrance was so fucked up he couldn’t even keep his eyes open. He sat in a corner on the floor grinning and nodding. Whatever he was on it was a hell of a lot stronger than weed.

“Get this junky muthafucka off my porch ’fore my Mom comes out here and sees that nigga!” Huey said, but nobody moved a muscle to comply and Huey went back to tinkering with the VCR. Everybody was so used to Huey complaining that they had learned to ignore him. Half of us were drunk already anyway and probably didn’t look a whole lot better than Terrance did.

Nikky held the bottle of MD under his T-shirt and constantly complained about its chill against his bare skin, but wouldn’t relinquish the bottle for anything. Everytime we passed it around he made sure it stopped at him before Huey’s mom came by. At fourteen years old he was an alcoholic in training.

Tank had somehow talked Fat Greg into springing for a pizza and they were both on the phone yelling at the pizza man about a free soda that was supposed to come with the pizza. The Twins, Jerome and Tyrone, who looked like two young, underfed, Muhammed Ali’s, were hogging the only two deck chairs and complaining about the heat and the long walk to the video store.

“Damn! It’s hotter than a muthafucka out here! I ain’t walking all the way back down to the Ave with ya’ll to take those videos back. That walk was long as fuck!”

“Stop cryin’ like a little bitch!” Little Drew spoke up and just as fast Jerome reached over and smacked him on the back of the neck.

Little Drew was the richest kid in the neighborhood mostly because he was the only kid we knew who still had both parents living together and two incomes coming in. He was an only child though and his parents practically paid us to hang out with him. When he was around us he liked to front like he was hard, but we all knew he was a mama’s boy. We always teased him that he should never commit a crime or else he’d wind up in prison with Kool-aide on his lips, washing drawls, braiding hair, and popping the zits on Bubba’s ass. We all knew that he would’ve rather gotten his asshole ripped open by a convict than take an honest ass-kicking. These days it was fools like him that you had to watch though. Nobody on earth was quicker to pull a trigger than a coward. He was supposed to be trying to help Huey hook up his mom’s VCR to Huey’s old black and white TV, but he kept butting into everyone’s conversation and getting abused for it.

“Damn, dog! You ain’t have to smack me in my goddamned neck!”

“Now who’s cryin’ like a little bitch?”

“I should take my damned VCR back for that shit.”

“You ain’t takin’ shit back. Now lift the TV so I can slip the VCR underneath it and stop being a little pussy before you get fucked,” Huey growled

“That’s right. You play pussy you get fucked!” Warlock co-signed, laughing his ass off.

Drew’s eyes misted over like he was about to cry as he looked around at us. He never knew when we were serious and when we were playin’ and he hated when we ganged up on him.

“Lift that shit, dog!” Huey yelled again and Drew obediently picked up the little TV.

We had planned to have a martial arts movie marathon and Drew’s mom had loaned us the VCR for the day as well as the money for the videos of course. Sometimes I think she’d have offered us some pussy to get Drew out from under her skirt for a few hours.

I was sitting on the porch railing praying the weather-beaten, termite-eaten thing wouldn’t collapse under my weight and send me tumbling down into that nest of weeds between the house and the street that we occasionally called a garden when in optimistic moods. It creaked and groaned every time I laughed and I thought I heard faint cracking and popping sounds, but everything just seemed to strike me as funny that day. There were Tasty Cake wrappers all over the porch and Huey was doing his best not to flip out about it though he had already mentioned the mess twice in five minutes. For such a sinister little thug he was almost prissy when it came to keeping things neat.

You could tell we were all from the same neighborhood at a glance. We all wore baggy shorts that hung down to our knees. Our boxer shorts stuck out the top as the shorts sagged well below our waistlines just barely covering our asses. We wore Nike, Adidas, or Reebok sneakers with matching tank-tops or t-shirts that were as oversized as our shorts. We all had baseball caps or sun visors spun backwards on our heads and of course we all wore dark sunglasses. Fat Greg was the only one wearing pants. That brother wouldn’t be caught dead in shorts; not with those overstuffed sausage-shaped legs of his.

Jerome and Tyron had started capping on each other’s moms evidently oblivious to the fact that they both shared the same mother. I laughed so hard that I could feel the decrepit railing struggling to hold me.

“Your mom’s so fat she had sex with two guys at the same time and they never even saw each other!”

“Your mom’s so dirty that she eats dinner with no panties on to keep the flies off her food.”

“Your mom’s so black that if you close your eyes you can see her better!”

“Your mom’s pussy spits tobacco!”

“Your mom’s pussy has whooping cough!”

Those brothas were crazy! I laughed so hard I dropped a forty of O.E. I had been hiding under my shirt. See, we all drank Colt 45 around the way and to drink another brand was almost treason, but I liked the way it tasted. The bottle hit the floor and exploded, sending shards of glass shrapnel spiraling across the rotting porch and beer pouring off into the garden like a miniature waterfall. I nearly fell off the railing I was laughing so hard. I felt the wood splinter with a loud crack and I jumped from it as Huey cast an angry glance in my direction.

“Man, clean that fucking beer up before my Mom comes out here and whoops all our asses!”

I went into Huey’s house to get a broom and dustpan and Mrs. Turner shook her head when I came back in and dumped the shattered forty into the trashcan.

“Ya’ll better not be making a mess out there. And I better not smell no weed out there either. Ya’ll shouldn’t even be drinkin’!”

“Uh…we ain’t drinkin’. I mean…not really. Just a little beer.”

“Boy, get your lyin’ ass out my kitchen ’fore I slap you right upside your head!”

I held in my laugh as I ran back out onto the porch.

“Your moms is a trip, dog.”

“Why? Did she say something about us drinkin’?”

“Dog, she ain’t even trippin’ off that. She just said we better not be smokin’ no weed out here.”

“She probably smells this nigga.” Huey grumbled staring at Warlock.

“Man, fuck you,” Warlock hissed.

The pizza man showed up just as Huey and Drew finally got the VCR set up. Greg handed the man a twenty and retrieved the extra-large pizza. The delivery boy turned around and started to walk off and Greg’s face contorted into a rictus of exaggerated outrage.

“Ay, dog! Da fuck is you goin’ with my change?”

“That’s my tip.”

“Nigga, I ain’t say shit about givin you no tip!”

“I know you ain’t gonna have me come all the way up here and not give a brotha no tip?”

“Dog, don’t be tryin’a play me like no sucker! What I look like some kind of fool to you?”

“Man, I ain’t tryin’a play you. I’m just tryin’ to get paid like everybody else.”

Greg was the type of brother who thought everyone was trying to get over on him and laughing at him behind his back. His self-esteem was so low that he even thought the retarded kids at school looked down on him. I guess it had something do with being overweight. He was all attitude and appetite. Greg wasn’t just large and solid like Tank. Tank could run a five minute mile even with all his bulk. Greg started breathing hard lifting his fat ass off the couch. He was all out of proportion. Short, with a huge stomach, plump stubby legs, arms that hung with cellulite like an old woman’s, and big saggy man-breasts. He had cause to be defensive. Me, Tank, Warlock, and the twins, rose up and stood behind Greg, anticipating a fight.

“Fuck that tip shit, nigga! Ya’ll muthafuckas wouldn’t even give me that free soda ya’ll advertised—talking about I had to order over twenty dollars worth of shit and this is only $17.50. Now you tryin’ to vic my change! You must be sick, fool!”

“Give that nigga his change before you get your ass fucked up.” Warlock growled. He was twenty years old by then, anorexicly skinny, and five inches shy of six feet. The delivery boy on the other hand was probably closer to twenty-five, well over six feet and swollen up like a heavyweight boxer. But one look at Warlock’s gold and you knew the man was a player. The pizza man looked Warlock up and down searching for a weapon then decided that he didn’t want to take any chances with a porchful of niggas in a strange neighborhood. For all he knew we could have been a gang or something with a house full of artillery.

“Man, here’s your damned two-fifty! You cheap-ass muthafucka! A brotha can’t even make a damned livin’!”

“Not off my money you can’t, muthafucka!”

“Ya’ll shut tha fuck up! The damned movie’s on!”

“Fuck you! Yella ass nigga!” Warlock joked, but he sat down to watch the film.

We started dividing up the pizza and in no time at all the box was nearly empty.

“Damn, niggas! I paid for the shit and all I get is one slice?”

Tank was standing there with the box in his hand, one slice still left inside, chomping down on another slice held in his huge meaty paw.

“Here, fool! Stop crying and take another slice!”

“Two whole slices? Thanks.” Greg frowned.

“Ay, if you don’t want it I’ll eat the muthufucka.”

“Fuck that shit!”

“Well all right then. Shut da fuck up and eat.”

The credits rolled and all conversation died to a whisper. It was a Run Run Shaw classic, The Five Deadly Venoms. Huey began giving us a blow-by-blow rundown of the action as it unfolded.

“See this big muthafucka right here? His name is Toad and he does this iron shirt technique that makes him impervious to weapons. Spears and swords just bounce right off of him. That’s a bad motherfucka right there.”

“I bet a bullet would stop his ass.” Little Drew offered trying to sound hard. Everyone just ignored him and kept watching the flick. We all knew that Drew’s momma would kick his ass if she ever found him with a gun. Bitch ass nigga couldn’t even leave the block without telling his mom first.

“See how in these Chinese movies when someone’s fighting a group of people they’re always moving, the camera angles keep changing, the people he’s fighting move in and out of camera range and everything is happening real fast so it don’t look like they’re just standing around waiting to get hit like in them fake-ass Van Damme flicks. Americans don’t know shit about making Kung Fu movies. This here is the real shit!”

We watched two other films and then we decided to play football. It was about six o’clock in the evening and it had finally cooled down. Besides that, Drew’s mom made him bring the VCR back in the house.

Darlene and Trina Livingston, two huge manly Jamaican girls who looked like female bodybuilders, had come out to play football with us. Darlene was the oldest. She was sixteen years old, had legs like Arnold Swartzenegger, and breasts like Pam Grier. She was the only one among us big enough to tackle Tank. Her younger sister Trina was just slightly smaller at 5’10” but no less intimidating. They were the best football players in the neighborhood. They could run, throw, catch, and hit like Mack trucks.

We chose up sides and I got Darlene, fat Greg, and both twins. Huey got Trina, Tank, Warlock, and Nikky. Terrance had finally come back to reality, but was still in no condition to play so he just sat on the porch and talked shit about everyone. We made him a referee.

We called the game 1-2-3 hold, but when it came down to it, it was straight up tackle. We played right in the middle of the street on concrete and asphalt. Slamming each other down hard on the steaming black top. Cars hardly ever came down our block and when they did we played right around them.

Huey’s team had the edge in speed, but we had brute strength on our side. Seeing Darlene and Tank go at it was truly awesome. They weren’t pulling any punches, at least Darlene wasn’t, and it looked like they were going to kill each other, slamming into one another full force without helmets or pads. I was the only one who knew that Tank had a crush on her and that he was in heaven feeling her rock hard body slamming into him.

At first our team steamrolled Huey’s. We slammed them into parked cars, denting not a few of them, slung them to the concrete like bundles of garbage, and wound up sending Warlock’s little ass home with a sprained ankle and bloody knees.

Huey bobbed and weaved like Deon Sanders and nobody could catch him. In the end their speed proved too much for us. They beat us 42 to 35. I knew that we had only gotten that far because Tank was holding back when it came time to tackle Darlene. She on the other hand was trying to knock the stuffing out of him. It was funny to see his big, black, love-struck ass bouncing off the concrete over and over again still grinning at her like an idiot as she ran right over him. That was one of the best days of my life and the last day of my childhood. It was soon after that that our lives changed for good.

— | — | —

Chapter 7

“This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”

—Al Capone

“…Here is something you can’t understand. How I can just kill a man!”

—Cypress Hill, “How I Can Just Kill A Man”

««—»»

There was a fierce heatwave scorching the life out of Philadelphia on the day I first met Scratch. The summer seemed like it would never end. The sun perched on our backs and rode us hard from six A.M. until damn near nine o’clock every night. The heat and humidity had coated the city like a sheet of hot oil. I think the temperature was ninety-eight degrees, but the humidity made it feel like a hundred and ten. The scorching temperatures were igniting fuses. The whole neighborhood was going ballistic. Folks were dying from knife and bullet wounds as much as from heat stroke. School was out. Violent crime was up. And everyone around my way was either trying to stay cool or trying to get paid. Both of which were nearly impossible in that boiling cauldron of madness and poverty that we called G-town.

Wasn’t much of anything going down in the G that day. Water gun fights, crack pipes flickering in the dark alleys that provided the only shade on our treeless little street. Those who had someone to fuck were sweating in their lover’s embrace propagating the next generation of the poor, hopeless, and pissed-da-fuck-off. Hip-hop music boomed from every radio, the bass thundering like the ghetto’s heartbeat, a testosterone thunder-drum pounding out the rhythm and song of Black rage and rebellion.

“…Fuck da police coming straight from the underground… a young brother got it bad ’cause I’m brown…”

The basketball courts were filled with future Julius Ervings, Magic Johnsons, and Micheal Jordans, sweating half the fluids in their bodies out on the hard concrete courts as they leapt toward the hoops. Every fire hydrant was pouring out hundreds of gallons of water onto the scarred and filthy streets as equally scarred and filthy kids laughed and played in its cool spray. Me and my boys, Tank and Huey, were sitting around pitying ourselves and trying to think of someone to make suffer for what we wanted, didn’t have, and could see no way of ever possibly affording, when a deer walked right into the middle of our pack and bared its throat to the wolves.

This kid’s name was Demetrious, “Meech” for his friends. He had just moved into the neighborhood from the Richard Allen Projects in North Philadelphia and he was always trying to prove himself by talking big about how tough his old neighborhood was, how we were all soft, how much money he had, and how many bitches he could pull; always bragging and showing off. As usual he started spitting some crazy tale to impress us, but this time he claimed to have evidence.

He said he was going to show us where he had hidden this gat he’d stolen from a dealer he used to mule for. He described in detail how he’d lifted this nickel plated .45 automatic and about two gees from the fool he worked for the day before him and his Mom had moved out of the housing projects and up into G-town. Immediately me and my boys began trying to figure out how to get the gun away from him and force him to get up off that cash.

“Show us that shit then. Unless you just bullshittin’?”

“I ain’t bullshittin’! I’ll show you.”

We walked with him across McCallum Street and onto Pomona on our way to the big empty lot between Cherokee Street and G-town Avenue. My skin was vibrating with excitement as if it was going to dance right off my body. It was the way I imagined crack fiends felt all the time. Somehow I knew that everything was about to change for us. I wish I could say now that I’d felt the warning signs, that I’d had some type of premonition, some foreboding of the evil we were about to step into. But all I felt was the greed. All I was thinking about was the cash and the gun and what I would do with it when I got it. Now I know that it had to happen this way. Evil draws evil.

The lot was overgrown with weeds and filled with big rats that crawled out of the sewers to eat the garter snakes, salamanders, and trash. We walked carefully, looking out for the larger rats that were known to bite kids. Demetrious bent down and turned over a huge slab of asphalt that had probably been thrown there years before during some type of road repair project.

“Yo, man here it is!” He held up a big shiny silver automatic that looked strangely familiar, “See, nigga? I told you I wasn’t just frontin’!” His features brightened into a proud smug expression as he brandished the impressive looking handgun. That’s when I stepped back and really took stock of the kid I was about to victimize.

He was as tall as me though slightly more filled out. A year older than me though obviously not as bright. His clothes were brand new. A typical hoodrat whose parents spent all their money on clothes and jewelry while their homes fell further and further into disrepair. He wore a Sixers jacket and a pair of Air Jordans, ridiculously oversized FUBU jeans that hung halfway off his diminutive ass, and a long T-shirt that came down to his knees that read “North Philly”. He wore a silver necklace with a huge crucifix attached to it. The biggest sinners were always the most religious.

His hair was cut short except for four or five inch long dreadlocks at the very front of his head. He wore what looked like a half-carat diamond stud in his left ear. I was sickened and insulted by Demetrious’ flashy affluence amid our conspicuous poverty and I decided right then and there that I had to have that Sixers jacket, those sneakers, and that jewelry even if this kid had to die.

“Yo, lemme see that shit.” I said casually; reaching out for the big heavy gun as if the last thing on my mind was rollin’ him for those two gees. He wasn’t a total fool, though, and my reputation for doin’ crazy shit proceeded me.

“Naw, dog. You ain’t never handled no gat. You might kill somebody with your crazy ass.”

“I’ve fired ’em before. Let me see tha mutherfucka.” Huey said in his cold raspy monotone sounding like wind whispering through a morgue. Huey looked like Lenny Kravitz or Maxwell, like he should have been on stage singing a love ballad rather than in the hood with us, but he was perhaps the most vicious of all of us and damned sure the spookiest. He knew what I was up to and so he stepped forward and pinned Meech down with his hard adult eyes, hollow and dangerous as shotgun shells. There was nothing in that glassy amphibian stare that could be appealed to, still Meech tried anyway.

“Hey, Yo, I don’t know, man. I mean you cool and all but…”

Demetrious squirmed and stammered as if he could feel Huey’s lifeless eyes crawling over his flesh probing for weaknesses.

“But nuthin’ then. I ain’t even gonna shoot tha muthafucka. I just wanna hold it. You know, check it out and shit.”

Huey inched closer to him and his voice dropped to a smooth seductive whisper. Demetrious was hypnotized as Huey’s lithe cappuchino colored fingers slid across his and slowly lifted the gun from his hands . I pushed back the memory of those same agile hands slipping a weapon out of my hands just a year ago and turning it on my father.

“A-a-awight man. You can hold it. But just you, okay?” Demetrious said, adjusting the silver cross dangling over his chest and cutting a quick glance at me. People were always more scared of me than of Huey for some reason; until they got to know him better. I wore my craziness on the outside like a uniform. Huey’s madness festered and boiled inside of him just beyond his eyes. It took a while to notice it.

Huey gripped the huge pistol by the handle with two hands. He checked the clip then jacked a round into the chamber, clicked off the safety and handed it to me. Sunlight glinted off the metal and my eyes took up the gleam.

“Yo, man! Don’t chamber no rounds! That shit could go off! And I don’t want this crazy-ass-nigga touchin’ it! Gimme that shit!”

“Just chill, Bro. Don’t trip.” Huey said as he stepped around to block Meech from snatching the gun, which would’ve been a fatal mistake.

“Naw, fuck that! I don’t want this psycho muthafucka fuckin’ around with my gat! Gimme that shit!” He reached for it and I pushed him back. Tank stepped up next to Huey and his tremendous girth literally blocked the sun. He stared down at Demetrious who seemed to be near panic, and grinned like a Downs Syndrome child with a mouthful of feces.

Tank was fourteen years old now and he was already as big as a heavyweight boxer, about 6’ 3” and 230lbs.

“You ain’t gonna let this punk bitch talk to you like that and get away with it is you, Snap?”

Snap was my nickname, earned because of my anger management issues and impulse control problems.

“Grab that nigga, Tank.”

Tank scooped Meech up like a sack of groceries, wrapping one of his thick meaty arms around Demetrious’ throat; not choking him, but preventing him from escaping. The other arm caught Meech’s right arm in an underhook. Meech fought and kicked to get free of Tank’s stranglehold, but there was no way he could free himself from the much larger boy. I stepped up and pressed the barrel of the gun against his right eye.

“I bet this muthafucka could blow the whole side of your head apart.” My eyes started getting that wild look as I remembered the way that Rasta’s head had flown to pieces and imagined this kid’s brains splattering across the grass. My breath came quicker and quicker in short ragged bursts. My blood raced through my veins carrying healthy loads of adrenaline. I wanted to do him. For no particular reason I wanted to smoke that fool. Just to see what it would look like.

“Come on, dog. Quit playin’! Don’t point that at me, dude! It could go off! Come on! Let me go! Quit playin’! Let go!”

“Nigga, do I look like I’m playin’ with your bitch ass?!”

Growing up in the projects of North Philadelphia, Demetrious had seen enough violence to know that this certainly wasn’t no joke. He started struggling harder and Tank was beginning to have a difficult time holding him.

“Bro, you better calm down right now or I’ll drop you right here. Word to God. If you say one more fuckin’ word I’ll split your wig wide open.” I had looked in the mirror often enough to know exactly what Meech saw on the other end of that gun; one big, black, crazy muthafucka who didn’t give a fuck about nothing.

Demetrious tried to change his approach and began begging and whining.

“Come on, Snap. I thought we was boys, man?”

Even though Snap was my nickname, at that time I was still ambiguous about it. It was okay for my friends to call me Snap, but some nigga I hardly knew?

“Bitch, I ain’t your fuckin’ boy! These is my boys right here.” I said, gesturing towards Tank and Huey. “I could give a fuck about your punk ass! Now what’s up with that cheddar, fool?”

“Bro, I swear I ain’t got no cash. I was just frontin’ about that shit.”

“Like you was frontin’ about this gat? I’m about to fly your head in two seconds so you better think fast.” I pressed the gun deeper into his eye and gritted my teeth, imagining the loud report of the huge weapon.

“It would be a damned shame if you was lyin’.” My eyes had gone vacant and glassy with the bloodlust. I was trying to muster up the courage to eat this kid’s brains the way I had seen that white gangster do when I first moved into this neighborhood. If a white boy could do it then I damned sure could too. Fuck if I was going to chew his balls off though. That was just takin’ it too far.

“Meech!!!”

An alien voice rang out behind us and I almost turned and shot at it, but I knew that Demetrious would have taken that opportunity to run and if I had to shoot him I didn’t want it to be in the back. That would have ruined his jacket and I still wanted it.

I turned my head and was surprised to see a white boy walking across the field with two hyper-muscular thugs on either side of him like massive black bookends. The white dude was wearing a FUBU shirt with pictures of Fat Albert and the gang on it. Two big platinum chains draped down over his emaciated chest one ending in a crucifix and the other with a diamond encrusted medallion shaped like the continent of Africa. On him both symbols were a mockery. He wore big clunky Timberland work boots despite the heat and lack of snow and a black “North Philly” baseball cap spun backwards on his blonde head. A pair of jet back “Loce” style sunglasses with the Gucci label on the arm completely hid his eyes, but I had seen them before, first furious and then enraptured as he had consumed that Rasta’s gray matter years ago. I hadn’t thought about that shit in a long time. After a while I had managed to convince myself that it had all been in my head. But seeing that white boy walking toward me across the field brought it all back to me. There standing across from me was the devil himself.

He had a platinum three-finger ring with the name “Scratch” spelled out in a cluster of diamonds. His mouth sparkled with platinum capped teeth with rubies embedded in the canines that gleamed in the failing twilight. The white boy’s sunglasses slipped down the bridge of his nose as he peered down at us and his cold blue eyes narrowed into slits. The whites of his eyes had sallowed from excessive marijuana use.

Back then I didn’t really know any white people. None of the kids I hung out with knew any either. We went to school with them, but we never spoke to them and they never spoke to us either and never ever came into our neighborhood. They were like mysterious specters existing just on the periphery of our experience. Influencing our lives in frightning and dramatic ways that we could scarcely imagine, but never seeming to come into direct contact with us. The man who shut off your heat and your telephone when you couldn’t afford to pay the bill that month was white. The man who tacked the eviction notice up on your door when the rent was late was white. The man who came to arrest your father and take him away to prison forever was white. In our minds, white people were right up there with God and the devil. They were spoken of in whispers and curses and appeared in gross proportions in every aspect of mass media from the pictures on our candy wrappers to the televisions, movies, magazines, and billboards we saw every day. They passed us in department stores and gave us strange looks that made us feel guilty and unclean, somehow less than a person

There was no doubting who he was. Even if I hadn’t seen him blast and then cannibalize that rasta on my doorstep a few years back, everyone had heard of Scratch by that time. Seeing a white boy living down in the ghetto slangin’ cane and shooting up the ’hood made news. By the time Huey, Tank, and I had gotten tight, Scratch had tightened his grip on the whole neighborhood and bizarrely had become both enemy and idol. He had “Gangsta” emblazoned across his soul right next to the neon sign that flashed “Murderer” in searing crimson. Since the day I’d seen him off one of Jah Warrior’s boys outside my window he’d grown into one of the biggest crack dealers in North Philadelphia. Still, I decided to front like I didn’t know him just to play hard. I was hoping he wouldn’t notice my legs shaking in my baggy jeans. I was scared shitless.

“Who the fuck is you?” I asked, still jamming the barrel of the gun into Meech’s eyesocket.

Scratch’s two bodyguard’s, dressed similarly in FUBU running suits and big clunky Timberland boots were already drawing their guns. Every dealer who was clockin’ major chips back then had bodyguards. His were megalomorphic giants both over six feet tall and close to 300lbs. They were teenagers as well, highschool athletes. The largest of them I recognized as a lineman on G-town High’s football team.

“That little mutherfucker owes me some chedda…” Scratch slurred, still glaring hard over the top of his Gucci sunglasses. Then he turned those cold slivers of ice toward Meech, “…and some pain.”

Demetrious shuddered visibly.

“I don’t give a fuck! We got business with him ourselves and since we got to him first you gonna have to wait your turn whoever your Vanilla Ice lookin’ ass is supposed to be.” I looked him up and down sneering contemptuously.

“You ever here of Scratch, little bro?” He asked calmly pointing to the name on his ring. “Well that’s who the fuck I am, my nizzle! So if you know what time it is you’ll act like you know and turn this fool over to me. You know I’m sayin’?”

His slang was thicker than the most ignorant thugs I knew, but it was obviously exaggerated. The dialect of someone reared on gangsta rap.

As if subtlety could exist in such titanic forms, his two bodyguards crept closer inch by inch trying to quietly position themselves for an ambush, plotting to jump me for the gun and smoke us all. But I wasn’t about to go out like that. I had lived with death all my life. I could sense its every movement and very nearly read its thoughts. It swirled around Scratch transposed over his image like a double exposure. The taint of it had already marked his bodyguards. I wondered then if it had perhaps marked us as well.

I nodded to Huey and he slipped around to the side of the bodyguard nearest him ready to intercept should they try some dumb shit. With Huey and his brother at my side I was feeling damned brave even though the two linebackers were both even larger than Tank, and Huey was smaller than all of us. However, what Huey lacked in size he more than made up for in skill. He was lethal with that martial arts shit.

“Alright, if you Scratch then what tha fuck do a big time hustler want with some little pussy-ass nigga like this? And what the fuck is you doin’ up here in the G? I thought ya’ll kicked it down in North Town?”

“This little bitch vic’ed some of my stash and my money. That’s why I’m here.”

Scratch smiled wide so that the sun sparkled on his bejeweled orthodontic work at which point his two bodyguards lunged clumsily for me. I had been anticipating the attack and squeezed off a shot, catching one of them high on the thigh and missing his family jewels by mere inches. Huey took the other one’s kneecap off with a roundhouse kick. His shin impacted the huge teenager’s patella with a sickening “Crunch!” that bent his leg backwards against the grain and sent him tumbling earthward with an ear-piercing shriek. Huey scowled viciously and then kicked the knee again eliciting a fresh howl of agony then he drew his foot back as far as he could and aimed a kick at the boy’s jaw. The jaw made a hollow popping sound as it came unhinged and hung stupidly from the fractured tendons. The big boy’s eyes rolled up in his head. He was unconscious before his head finished its decent to the steaming dirt floor.

The bodyguard I’d shot was reeling on the floor cursing and groaning in pain and rage. The recoil from the huge gun had nearly torn it from my grasp. My heart was trip-hammering in my chest and my blood raced with exhiliration. I nearly swooned with the rush of adrenalin that hit me as I pulled the trigger. It was nearly as strong as the recoil from the gun and I stood there trembling; visibly shaken by it as the big black leg breaker prepared to aim a shot at my head.

“Muthafucka! You shot me! You little bastard muthafucker! I’ma kill your punk ass!”

“Fool, you ain’t killin’ shit.”

He was too slow and Huey was on the case, silencing him with a kick to the bridge of the nose that shattered the delicate cartiledge and smeared his nose across his face in a bloody spray before he could properly aim. The shot sailed about two feet over my head and ricocheted off a building somewhere off in the distance. Huey collected both the guns from the two fallen killers. Half the size of Scratch’s tremendous bodyguards, Huey’s psychotic ferocity and martial arts knowledge had made him twice their match. They hadn’t stood a chance.

“What was you gonna try and smoke all of us over this muthafucka?”

Scratch shrugged his shoulders as if to say: “You can’t blame a muthafucker for tryin’,” and kept staring from me to Demetrious to the two defeated leg-breakers and then to Huey who leveled his eyes, blistering with an inexplicable hatred, at him as if they were lasers that could burn him to a cinder. I looked down at the two guns in his hands and hoped that he wouldn’t shoot. Huey hated white people as if each and every member of the race had done him some grave and personal injustice. A white boy who had just tried to kill him was almost guaranteed a trip to the grave. But we both knew better than to off a guy like Scratch.

“Okay, so now what?” Scratch asked. He tucked his sunglasses back over his eyes to hide his expression and a bemused smirk creased his face.

“How you know I won’t smoke your cracker ass right now?”

“You won’t,” he said flatly.

I punched Demetrious in the gut with the loaded .45 letting a little air out of his lungs, then I pointed the pistol right at Scratch.

“You want him that bad?”

“Yeah. That nigga owes me.” Even though he tried to remain calm, I could tell he was shaken by the quick efficient handling of his bodyguards. He was staring at Huey like he had just stepped out of a spaceship. Huey stared back at the white thug like he was a particularly large and unpleasant pimple that he was considering squeezing the puss out of.

Scratch’s cunning, televangelist, con-man smile resurrected itself, stretching nearly around to the back of his head and displaying each one of his platinum capped teeth. He looked like a great white shark about to swallow a boatload of sun worshippers.

“Ya’ll ain’t no killas. How about I let you keep the guns if you give that muthafucka over to me and I promise you won’t catch no static for fuckin’ up my bodyguards either. Punk-ass niggas couldn’t handle a bunch of freshman then they deserved to get broke up.”

“Well, that’s damned generous and all, but we keepin’ these gats anyway so that ain’t no deal. But I tell you what, you let us keep the cash he took from you and we’ll get the drugs back plus I’ll blast this nigga for you.”

“Naw! Naw! Ya’ll can’t just kill me! I’m just a kid! I ain’t did shit! I ain’t got shit, Scratch, and if I did, you know I’d give it up. I wouldn’t hold out on you, bro! I ain’t got no drugs.”

“You ain’t got shit, huh? Then what was all that shit you was talkin’ ’fore he showed up? And stop squirmin’ before you mess around and rip that jacket ’cause once you’re a ghost I own that shit.”

Demetrious still believed he could just talk his way out of this and walk away with his life. I smacked him hard with the heavy pistol opening a huge gash on his head that began dripping bright red blood. He slumped in Tank’s grasp, his eyes wild with fear. The bloodlust was vibrating in my nerves, churning in my stomach like physical hunger. I wanted to shoot the gun again. But this time…I wanted to kill.

“Get that fuckin’ jacket off ’fore you fuck it up! That shit’s mine now. And get them sneaks off too!”

Scratch seemed to relax then. He slid the sunglasses down his nose and looked over them at us shaking his head, finding our vicous greed both amusing and pitiful like lions in a circus. It was the way white people had looked at me all my life and it made me furious. Tank jerked the jacket off Demetrious’ shoulders and I punched the gun into his eye socket again.

“Don’t think about tryin’a break out cause I’ll cap your ass right tha fuck here! That’s my word, dog. Now try me!”

Demetrious stared meekly into my eyes and remained still as Tank removed the jacket.

“But I ain’t do shit!”

“Shut tha fuck up!”

I turned back to Scratch.

“We got a deal or what?”

“Word, little G. We got a deal. Just don’t bitch when it’s time to fulfill your end.”

“Fuck that. I don’t never bitch from no two gees.”

“Hah! You niggers ain’t never even seen two gees.”

I bristled at the way he pronounced “niggers.” I wanted to cap his ass just for that.

“So, how you gonna get him to tell where the shit’s at? You bad little thugs got the heart for torture?”

“I know where the fuck it’s at,” I said confidently, but inwardly uncertain.

“He had this gat just sittin’ there under that rock where somebody might have found it. I bet the rest of that shit’s right in his bedroom or…”

Quickly, I turned and smacked Meech with the gun again as hard as I could causing Tank to wince and step back as blood from Demetrious’ forehead splattered his face allowing him to slump to the ground. His eyes rolled back in his head and his forehead continued spraying blood from the fresh wound.

There was something I loved about head wounds. The blood was brighter, redder, and it pumped out more easily. It reminded me of Darryl’s war stories. When I got older I would be known for shooting fools in the head even though everyone knew the body was an easier target and that someday I would miss and wind up getting my ass killed. It was dumb and dangerous, but it became my thing.

A lot of wannabe gangstas carried guns, but few actually used them; still fewer of those who used them actually intended to kill. Often they would shoot a fool in the gut where they might be paralyzed if it hit their spine, but not killed. But if you flew some fool’s head it left no doubt in anyone’s mind that you meant the shot to be fatal. I bent down over Meech’s semi-conscious form and began pulling cash out of his pockets.

“Yeah! I knew that shit! This dumb muthafucka. I knew if he wouldn’t hide a gun in his crib he wasn’t gonna hide no two gees there.”

I unfastened his pants and pulled them down to his knees. There was more money and a big sack of white powder in his drawls.

“Little dick muthafucka! I should have known you wouldn’t leave this shit lyin’ around for your momma to find.”

“That little ass sack ain’t all of it though.”

I stopped and thought a moment. Had this kid started hittin’ the pipe and smoked that shit all up or had he sold it? If he’d sold it then where was the other money? Then Tank spoke up.

“Yo, right here man.”

He reached into the Sixers jacket and pulled two more fat sacks from the lining. The three sacks combined must have weighed five or six pounds.

“Well there you go, white boy. I guess that means this cash is ours then.”

“Nuh-uh, nigger. You ain’t finished.” Scratch said pointing to Meech.

“You know what, white boy. I don’t like no fuckin’ peckerwood callin’ me nigga.” I pointed the gun at his head again and that crazy look was back in my eyes.

“You stallin’ or what?” Scratch said with a smirk.

“Step back, Tank.” Tank dutifully stepped away from Demetrious who was just starting to revive.

The bodyguard I’d shot in the thigh started talking shit again and I swerved the gun away from Scratch and pointed it at him until I realized he wasn’t armed then I pointed it back at Scratch.

“He ain’t gonna do it, Scratch. He’s just a little bitch! And I’ma smoke him and his little faggot friends when…”

I swiveled like a turrent and aimed the gun at Demetrious who was now wide awake and staring at me in horror. I pulled the trigger.

BLAM!,

The report from the .45 interrupted the tirade from the larger of Scratch’s bodyguards who now stood gripping his wounded thigh; squeezing it as if to force out the bullet. Blood was caked all over his face from his shattered nose. Demetrious’s chest had blossomed in an explosion of red like some great ghastly rose blooming. The kind that only bloomed in hell. His hands thrust out in front of him as if to ward off the bullet, fluttered limply to the ground with a jagged hole between the middle and index fingers of his left hand, and a long whistling exhalation issued from his lungs as they rid themselves of the now pointless oxygen. His pants were still down around his knees and his briefs turned crimson as his heart pumped his body dry trying to get blood past the ruptured arteries and pulverized organs and up to his brain succeeding only in spurting it out of his ruined chest in a steady fount.

I stuffed the money in my pockets in big handfuls and tossed the sacks of coke to Scratch. Snatching up the red Sixers jacket I started to retreat then paused to untie Meech’s sneakers and slip them off his feet. If I had seen how much blood had soaked into them I would have left them. Tank wrenched the half-carat diamond out of his ear and held it up to the sun grinning autistically as it refracted the light, then he shoved it deep in his pockets and turned to his brother who showed neither scorn nor approval. I removed the platinum crucifix from around his neck and tossed it to Huey. Huey held the necklace in his hands staring at the tortured effigy of Christ as if it were the most horrible thing he’d ever seen. It dripped with Meech’s blood adding a gruesome realism to the artistic rendering. It was as if we were witnessing the crucifixion in miniature. Huey stared at it a moment more and then stuffed it in his pocket.

Huey and Tank fell in behind me with their reappropriated weapons pointed right at Scratch whose mischievous smile had once again abandoned his face. His two bodyguards were behind him, licking their wounds in mute shock.

“That was evil. That was just plain vicious!” The smaller of the two bodyguards said, holding his jaw in place with one hand. Scratch’s smile slowly slithered back onto his face like some alien presence taking over him, but it never reached his eyes. They remained cold slivers of blue ice glaring frostily over the top his Gucci sunglasses.

“Yeah, I likes that. You boys did just fine. I’ma have to have ya’ll come work for me when ya’ll get older. Yeah, I’ma see ya’ll again. Soon.”

His words hung ominously in the air like a curse carved into the mouth of a tomb. We slipped out of the lot. We ran up the street and ducked into an alley on Cherokee and Duval streets behind the old laundromat, which was now a crackhouse and shooting gallery. Moments later we heard two gunshots come from the lot. We stopped and looked at each other, but didn’t say a word. Then Tank and I both noticed that Huey was sobbing. This too brought back the recent memory of Darryl’s murder. He had cried then too.

“Fuck is you cryin’ for, nigga? You actin’ like some kinda bitch!” Tank said as his big dumb smirk twisted into a malicious scowl of disgust.

Huey punched him in the side of his head. Hard. But of course Tank was just barely fazed.

“Fool, if you can take another brotha’s life and not be affected by that shit then you ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ monster. You’re a devil just like that white muthafucka back there! Sometimes we gotta do what we gotta do to come up, but still…don’t nobody deserve to die.”

He stormed off leaving Tank and I standing alone in the piss-smelling alley, shocked and confused.

Huey was one strange brotha sometimes—too deep and too spooky to really relate to. I thought about what he’d said all night and then dismissed it. It made no sense to me. It only depressed and confused me to think about the senselessness of some brothas dying just so other brothas could enjoy a fleeting moment of success. Niggas lived. Niggas died. And if I didn’t pull the trigger it was just a matter of time before someone else did or they dropped the hammer on someone else themselves. Why cry over what you couldn’t change?

Still, Huey had made me question myself and think about the little boy whose life I’d stolen, his parents grief, and how his life may have turned out had I not abbreviated it. I fought down the tears not wanting to admit that Huey might’ve been right.

Later that night we heard on the news that three bodies were found in the lot; two seventeen year-old boys, one with a broken jaw and dislocated knee, the other with a bullet hole through his left thigh and a broken nose. They both had three clean nine millimeter bullet holes through the back of their heads. One had three entrance wounds but only two exit wounds. One in the roof of his mouth and the other in his lower jaw. Three front teeth and the tip of his tongue had been sheared off. The other one had acquired a third eye and been reduced to one nostril. The last bullet had gone through the very top of his head and down his throat.

“There was also a fourteen year-old boy with multiple blunt instrument trauma to the skull and a gunshot wound in his chest…” The newswoman continued.

Scratch had retired his two leg-breakers with three clean shots each for getting their asses kicked by ninth graders. Unknowingly, we had taken three lives.

What the newscaster didn’t say, but I knew, was that all three of them had their brains sucked out of the holes in their skulls. They didn’t need to report it on TV for the news to make its way around the neighborhood. Things like that had a way of getting out no matter how hard the police tried to suppress it.

The newscaster wrote the incident off as “…yet another in a long series of senseless drug related killings in the Germantown section of Philadelphia…” She had no idea just how senseless these particular killings were. I started sleeping with the .45 under my pillow and locked every window and door before I closed my eyes to sleep, no matter how hot it was. I still can’t sleep in a house with a window open.

We entered the 8^th grade with brand new wardrobes in all the latest fashions and at least two pairs of sneakers each. Our new gear established us in school as bonafide playas.

Our new status was a drastic change from what we had previously known and we weren’t at all willing to go back to the dirty little street thugs that everyone made fun of. Right then and there we decided that we had to stay suited up properly no matter what we had to do or to whom we had to do it. When our mother’s asked us where we had gotten all the clothes we told them that we had a friend who worked at a clothing store and they had stolen them for us. Our parents scolded us half-heartedly for stealing, but were secretly relieved not to have to buy us back-to-school clothes. In the ghetto the gift horse was so rare that when it came you didn’t just look it in the mouth you cut it open and gutted it out.

We never talked about how we had really gotten the new gear, not even to each other, and we tried to pretend that we really had stolen them rather than paid for them with money soaked in blood. Black blood. We had all become killers that year and our lives were irrevocably altered.

— | — | —

Chapter 8

“I’m from the place where the church is the flakiest… And nigguz been prayin’ to God so long that they’re atheist.”

—Jay-Z, “Marcy”

««—»»

In the ghetto, as in the world, clothes make the man. The policeman’s uniform, the prostitute’s latex mini-skirt, the pimp’s gator shoes, the gangsta’s low slung jeans sagging off his ass. They all give clues to the nature of the individual beneath. Books are judged by their covers here and we strolled through the halls of our little Jr. High School covered in FUBU, Adidas, Nike, and Gucci. Fights were no longer started by insults from others about our outdated clothing. We were stylin’ now. The girls treated us differently now too. They actually asked us over to their houses and out to the movies rather than just laughing in our faces when we tried to ask them. The clothes made all the difference.

We acted differently too. In a society where the standard of excellence is wealth, poverty can tax your self-esteem and your entire sense of self-worth. Likewise, a dose of affluence can boost your confidence tremendously. My grades, which had been slowly slipping down into the toilet, made a dramatic recovery. I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand in class and ask questions when I didn’t understand something. I didn’t mind calling attention to myself anymore. Not when I was wearing two hundred dollars worth of designer labels on my back.

Mrs. Greenblade, who credited herself for my transformation from class clown to honor student, began to take a special interest in me. She convinced me to work on the school newspaper writing editorials on school politics and an occasional book or movie review. I loved writing and so I started reading the paper everyday and took elaborate pains to make all the articles I wrote sound professional, just like the ones in the Philadelphia Enquirer. It excited me to finally be appreciated for something other than just being a bad-ass crazy mutherfucker. Even though I knew that hardly anyone but the teachers really even read the damned thing unless, of course, someone had been robbed, or beaten, or shot. Kids were morbid like that.

Mrs. Greenblade even tried to convince me to give up my lunch period to attend her journalism class, but I had to pass on that. Since I was already staying an hour after school to work on the paper I figured she could teach me all I needed to know about journalism then. Lunchtime was when me and my boys jacked fools for their cash. I couldn’t give that up.

At the teacher’s suggestion I began to keep notes of my daily thoughts and experiences. A lot of what I’m sayin’ here today comes out of those notes. It’s hard to recall how much of it really happened and how much of it is just bullshit. Being a writer it’s always difficult to refrain from embellishment and the whole story is just so difficult to believe. Still, it’s as honest a telling as I can manage.

When I reached the eighth grade, Mrs. Greenblade recommended me for the mentally gifted program after I passed the level fourteen English test; the equivalent of college freshman English. Unfortunately, my math scores were about two grades below the level they should have been for my age and they rejected me with a recommendation that I get some tutoring to improve my math skills.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get into the program. I can’t believe you weren’t accepted. You’re one of the brightest students I’ve ever taught. If you want I could arrange for someone to tutor you on your fractions and long division and we could try it again in a couple of months?”

“Naw, don’t sweat it. I ain’t want to kick it with them computer geeks no way.”

“How is it that you can write such beautiful poetry and essays and speak so eloquently in the classroom and then speak like such a savage?”

“You’re supposed to speak all proper in class. I mean, I thought we was just being casual right now. You know, just talkin’ like friends.”

“I want you to talk to me like a friend, Malik. I just don’t understand why you can’t speak intelligently all the time. Why do you have to talk like the rest of those ignorant heathens when you’ve got more upstairs?”

“Because I’m one of those ignorant heathens. And when I leave here that’s what I go home to. And they ain’t the type that respects proper diction. Talking above them won’t win me any friends.”

“And talking beneath yourself will?”

“You know, when I’m at home my mom and my grandmom are constantly correcting my speech. They want to make sure that when I get older and go out on job interviews, or if I wind up at some Ivy League college or something, I won’t give the white man any excuse to think I’m any less intelligent than he is. She wants me to be able to enunciate and pontificate with the best of ’em. She even had me reading the dictionary. She heard some professor say that if you committed yourself to learning one new word a day you’d be one of the smartest people on earth in just a few years. I’m still in the Bs. Do you know what a Bête Noir is? Its literal translation is Black Beast and it means an adversary or something loathsome. I’ve got tons of useless words like that floating around in my head. When the hell do you think I’m ever going to use Bête Noir in conversation? But I learn all this shit to make my mom happy. Last year my grandmom took all my comic books away. You know what she has me reading now?”

“What?”

“Roots, African Genesis, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Song of Solomon, Native Son. She finishes reading a book and hands it right to me as if there was no difference between us and I read them from cover to cover. I don’t understand a lot of it, but she helps me. I keep a dictionary nearby too. It sometimes takes me months to finish one but I read them because that’s what my mom wants. I read those books before I read the junk you guys give us to read in here. I read them because I don’t want my Grandma to lose faith in me. She thinks I can be somebody some day.”

“That sounds great. It sounds like your grandmother is a very wise woman.”

“Yeah, but even though my mom and my grandmom know how smart I am my mom always tells me not to ever talk above my own people. You know why, Mrs. Greenblade? Do you know why she tells me that?”

“No. I honestly don’t”

“Because I don’t live in the world of books and poetry. I live in the damned ghetto and what good is language except to communicate? What good are fancy words that no one understands? I talk to you this way because this is what you understand. But I talk slang in the street because that’s the language they understand out there. My mom taught me that the dialects of the streets are just as complex and beautiful as the Queen’s English and that I should learn that language just as well as book language so that I can communicate with everyone. You see, Black folks have to live in two worlds, the world of Business and Academia, the White world, and the world of the streets. You feel me?”

“Yeah, Malik. I feel you. You mother is very wise and very right. Maybe I should take some of her advice myself huh?”

“Nah. If you ever said, Fo’ shizzle my nizzle, I think I’d die laughing. Either that or punch you right in the mouth.”

I turned to leave. Lunch had begun ten minutes ago and I was anxious to bully my way into the lunch line, eat, and hook up with Tank and Huey out in the yard.

“Malik?”

“Yes, Mrs. Greenblade?”

“Would it be alright if I passed you along some of the books I read?”

“Yeah, that would be cool.”

Mrs. Greenblade turned me on to some stuff that would change the way I looked at the world forever. Existentialism gave voice to many of the intuitions I’d had growing up. Intuitions that told me that maybe all this suffering was for nothing.