“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 everyon
e 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 press
ed 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.
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