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 edg
e 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 li
fted 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.
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