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 8th 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 affluenc
e 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.
I read Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus. I read a play by Sartre called Nausea. I devoured Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund and Siddhartha. I was entranced by Dostoyevski’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man and the novel that had the most impact upon me, The Brothers Karamozov. I had never read anything like these novels. They were full of spite and cynicism, ranting tirades of existential angst. I know now that I wasn’t ready for it. I was overwhelmed and nearly devastated by the revelations these books brought me to. Desperate questions, blasphemies, whose answers only led to more questions. A snowball effect that caused a ricochet in my brain. Questions bouncing back and forth at increasing velocity and force until it felt like my mind would shatter. Why? Why? Why? Why? They turned my whole world upside down.
I read these books feverishly and each one pained me as much as it thrilled me. It was in a chapter of The Brothers Karamozov titled “Rebellion” that I received my most disturbing, and horrifying, enlightening. One of the novel’s main characters, Ivan Karamozov, issued the most powerful indictment of Christianity I had ever heard.
He described in graphic detail the suffering of a little girl who was abused by her parents and forced to sleep in an outhouse and a little boy who was torn apart by hunting dogs and he asked what kind of divine plan could rest on the suffering of little children? Ivan Karamozov wanted no part of such a plan. No eternal harmony was worth the suffering of innocents and any god who would allow such a thing was unjust.
It was too high a price. “I prefer to live with my unavenged suffering and my unappeased anger…” he shouted, rather than accept what he deemed to be the “overpriced ticket” to paradise; rather than participate in the cruel plans of an unjust God.
I kept the book in my back pocket and read it over and over again. Not the entire book, just that one chapter, until the pages fell out of it.
I had always believed in the goodness of God even though everything in my experience spoke against it. Every horrible thing I’d witnessed in the hood flew in the face of faith and the idea of a wise and benevolent deity, but still I believed because that’s what I had been taught to do. I hadn’t even been aware that disbelief was an option. But now I knew. There were disbelievers and no lightning bolts had come down from the sky to smite them. I checked. A seed of doubt had been sown and even God’s very existence was now in question. Mrs. Greenblade may not have realized it, but by making me think and question my beliefs, exposing me to those self-tortured European authors and philosophers who seemed to believe in nothing, she might have corrupted me more than anything that had ever happened to me in the streets. Ironically, it was the words of a preacher at my Mom’s church that issued the most tragic wound to my faith.
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