Stephen thought of himself as an angel who had fallen from grace into a hell where savage Black devils waited to rend his flesh to ribbons and abscond with his soul. Each day was a misery and every sight, sound, and smell, was a profanity that mauled his senses and defiled his innocence.
His room was his only oasis. He had put a lock on the door and filled the room with books and comics. He kept a Walkman cassette player hidden under his bed so he could listen to music while he read horror novels. The books, along with most of the tapes, he’d stolen from Woolworths down on Germantown Avenue. No one really paid much attention to the book section. It wasn’t normally a major target of thieves. He would read Stephen King novels, and books by Harlan Ellison, Graham Masterson and then Clive Barker and Jack Ketchum, reading long into the night as dope fiends and crackheads, friends of Nikky and his dad, partied on the other side of the door.
They brought home an old Black and White TV one day that they’d stolen from somewhere and had been unable to sell. It only worked intermittently, but it was better than nothing. Stephen brought it into his room and it, along with the horror novels, and Heavy Metal tapes, became his escape from the hell of the ghetto.
During the night, he clutched his dad’s old .22 rifle to his chest; afraid that one of the dope fiends would break into his room and try to touch him. In the mornings, he crept through the piles of beer cans and liquor bottles, empty fast-food containers and junk-food wrappers, tip-toeing between the listless unconscious forms of his dad’s new friends. He would risk the inevitable beating and steal whatever money was left over from their late night binge then catch the subway to McDonalds at Broad Street and Columbia Ave before making his way to school. They were barely managing to survive off of welfare and so his dad had begun selling small quantities of cocaine to support his habit and keep them all from starving to death and being kicked out on the street. Even though the rent in their little project apartment was only $180 a month, it still had to be paid. Nikky still turned an occasional trick to help out as well.
Stephen was miserable and had stopped speaking to either his dad or Nikky. He just locked himself in his room and watched TV and read and dreamed of making enough money somehow to get back to New York, back his real mother whom he was sure must miss him terribly. In reality, the former Mrs. Liza Hechtman, who was now the current Mrs. Liza Newborn, had never really been cut out for motherhood and being rid of the moody young boy with the long curly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes that she had given birth to, had freed her to pursue her life with her new husband. He too, an artist who was ten years her junior and unemployed, was unsuited and uninterested in parenthood. Once a month she would send a child support check that Nikky and his dad promptly smoked up.
At school, little Stephen was the teacher’s pet. Smart, always eager to answer questions and help other kids, he couldn’t understand why the other children resented him so much.Although he was the only White kid in his neighborhood, at school there were a few other White kids who seemed to fit in just fine. But for him, school would be a hard test for many years until he started slangin’ caine.
Stephen was not a small boy by any means, but he had never been in a fight before attending school in North Philly and he had no idea how to defend himself. He was beaten up frequently but he never backed down, never gave up his lunch money, never let anyone steal his clothes or sneakers. Instead, he would take the ass-whipping. Each blow he received, to him, justified his hatred of Blacks and secretly, he took pleasure in it.
“You talk like a White boy.”
It was lunch time and Stephen was sitting in the cafeteria trying to choke down a peanut butter sandwich when a short, raggedy-looking, black kid with a chipped front tooth, and a patch of shiny crinkled skin on his forehead from where he had suffered a third degree burn, came walking up behind him. The kid had a short Jheri curl that had dried out and turned frizzy. He looked like a pre-adolescent junkie.
“I am White.”
“Yeah, but you sound like Richard Pryor doing an impersonation of a White boy. I didn’t even know people really talked like that. You sound like a little pussy talkin’ like that!”
“Man, just leave me alone.”
“Sound just like a little pussy! What else you got in that lunch bag, little pussy?”
“Boy, you are not getting my lunch.”
“Well, then you’d better give me some money so I can buy a lunch or else you gonna get your ass kicked!”
The idea of this short skinny little kid intimidating the much larger boy would have been laughable if it weren’t for the fact that Steven was white and to most kids in the projects, white boys were considered easy targets.
“Go ahead and kick my ass then!”
Steven stood up and when the boy saw that that Steven was taller than him he started to back off, but pride would not allow it, and once he started punching Steven he found him a willing victim who didn’t even try to fight back. Pretty soon, there was a crowd around the two boys. No one jumped in to break it up. For them, this was a rare and welcome sport. A break from the day’s monotony. Steven fell to the floor and curled into the fetal position. The crowd of spectators seemed to have been waiting for that moment, and moved in to do the North Philly stomp all over his cringing body as soon as he hit the floor. When a teacher’s aide finally intervened, Steven had suffered little more than a bloody nose and a few bruises, having done a successful job at covering himself from the blows, but his ego was grievously wounded. He’d had enough.
“What happened to you, son?”
“I just got my ass kicked! Like you fuckin care!”
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that! I’m your father!”
“When?! When are you ever my father?! When was the last time you were there for me?!”
“Stevie!” His mouth opened but nothing else would come out. He collapsed onto the ragged sofa with a look of defeat.
Stevie went into his bedroom and turned on the T.V. He pulled out the rifle, loaded it, and pointed it out the window. He pretended he was a KKK member in the deep south and he was hunting niggers who had raped innocent little white girls. He took aim at the group of black kids under the street lamp, but only pretended to fire. He imagined explosions of blood; muscle and bone avulsed, penetrated, and pulverized as the bullets tore through vital organs. He felt energized. He had almost forgotten the indiginity he’d suffered at the hands of the battle scarred young black boy, but then when he remembered him and imagined turning the rifle on him and seeing the terror in his eyes, a new and delicious thrill electrified his nervous system. With a gun in his hand, he realized he would never be a victim again.
The next day, Steven stayed home from school. At 3 o’clock he left his house with the .22 rifle under his arm and started to walk to school. At 3:15 p.m., as the kids made their way home from school, Steven walked up, found a spot across the street, got down on one knee, and lined up the sites. A tall gawky girl in pig tails was the first to see him.
“Hey! That kid’s got a gun!” she screamed.
Steven fired and the little boy, Harold Green, age ten, the youngest of eight children, a C+ student, bed wetter, comic book collector, junk food junkie, bully, folded in half, and flew backwards several feet. The high powered projectiles disemboweled the poor kid. He clutched his stomach and tiny pink, blue, and purple loops of intestines unraveled and spilled out between his fingers. Steven Jr. had fired three times, and all three shots had caught little Harold in the gut, eviscerating him. Harold lingered for four days after the five hours of surgery to repair his lacerated entrails. On the fifth day he died of shock brought on by infection. Little Stevie spent less than a day in jail for the crime.
One of his fathers high powered Wall Street lawyer friends made the trip down to Philly, and ripped the asshole out of the young inexperienced prosecutor who was assigned to the case. He paid Steven’s bail, and took him back to the projects. The district attorney’s office decided not to prosecute due to l
ack of evidence, despite the possession of nearly a dozen signed statements of witnesses who claimed they could positively identify the little white boy as the killer. Charges were dropped and little Stevie Hetchman Jr. went right back to his miserable little life. But things had changed. Mr Hechtman’s Wall Street buddy was appalled to see how low his friend had sunk and offered to lend him a few dollars to get back on his feet. That few dollars was about twenty thousand, and the senior Steven Hechtman, still the financial genius, used that money to launch his own little drug business, and in the projects, business was booming.
Hetchman set up his drug operation out of his own apartment on the eighth floor of Cambridge Plaza in the Richard Allen projects. He paid off the housing authority police to not only look the other way but to guard his stash from thieves and rival dealers.
In the beginning, he used his own son as a mule to deliver the caps (small vials of cocaine) to his dealers and to bring the money back to the apartment. Those ambitious dealers who wanted to buy real weight and go into business for themselves were allowed up to the apartment accompanied by one or more housing cops. They dealt through Nikky. No one ever saw Mr. Hechtman. He stayed in the background, organizing and planning. Negotiating with thugs was not his forte.
Every weekend, the old couple down the hall took the long drive down the coast to Miami where their tires were filled with several kilograms of cocaine. Then they drove their navy blue Buick station wagon with luggage strapped to the roof and tacky tourist trap souveniers littering the back window, back up the coast at exactly five miles above the speed limit. Not slow enough or fast enough to attract attention, looking for all the world like an old retired couple enjoying a long deserved vacation. For their troubles they received five hundred dollars a week and free rent. For his efforts, Steven Hechtman was able to cut out the middle man and buy directly from the Columbians allowing him to make a larger profit than his competitors and still deliver a purer product. He bought his product right off the boat from Columbia. Pretty soon he had dealers on almost every block in North Philadelphia.
The demand for his product grew so large and his orders so huge that the Columbians began travelling to Philly to deal with him directly. This all made Stephen nervous as hell but it helped minimize the risk of transporting the product across state lines.
Two years after their enterprise began, crack cocaine was introduced to our neighborhood and quickly replaced the more expensive white powder. Business quadrupled. Little Stevie Jr. became the head of the dozen or so ten, eleven, and twelve-year-old kids who raced back and forth to the apartment, picking up the rocks when they were finished cooking, and racing them down to the dealers. Their customers often lined up in paranoid, scratching, jittering lines awaiting the arrival of their pharmaceutical paradise. After dropping off the prodoct, the runners would then hightail it back to the apartment to drop off the cash. The dealers were required to turn over all their cash to the runners who would sign for it and issue a sort of coded receipt. Nikky would drive up later in her new, money green Lincoln Towncar to give them their percentage.
Nikky was in charge of the soldiers, the Housing Authority cops and the thugs they had hand picked to act as security and disciplinarians to his legion of dealers. If any of the young slangers were bold enough to take their percentage out before they gave the money to the runners, then punishment was administered swiftly and brutally. Drugs had leached away all of Nikky’s humanity and compassion leaving a vicious, paranoid, sociopath who often miscounted the take and punished innocent dealers.
Little Stevie loved to go along on these trips. Almost every week someone was dumb enough to try to cheat the system and had to be dealt with. Either that or Nikky was just so high that she thought they were cheating. The result was the same. Stevie would wait in the car as one of the soldiers would jump out and break some young kids wrists or hands, or crack a bat across his knees and ribs. When Nikky was in one of her really vicious moods, she’d order one of her soldiers to retire a dealer by taking him into an alley and putting a bullet in his head and then spraying him with the Uzi sub-machine gun, unloading an entire clip into his face and torso and leaving him completely unrecognizable.
Once, Stevie asked if he could be the one to swing the bat but Nikky had refused even though her enforcers seemed amused by the idea. He didn’t bother to ask if he could use the uzi. He knew his day would come.
Stevie took good care of the runners he lorded over. Each and every one of them had brand new BMX bikes, backpacks, and beepers, and he cut them a lot of slack, even when he knew they had stolen a little cash or product as long as they didn’t get too greedy. He would simply threaten to expose them if they did it again and the idea of Nikky and her leg-breakers coming for them usually straightened them out. Then he’d alter a few receipts and make the neccessary excuses to save their asses, further indebting them to him and giving him the power of life or death over them. If they were dumb enough to have gotten strung out then he would let them resign discreetly. Conversely, any runner who disrespected him would find their receipts altered and themselves accused of stealing which often meant a death sentence.
Stevie knew that it wasn’t easy being a runner. They were the hardest working and lowest paid link in the drug chain, except perhaps the drug-addled housewives and retirees that cut the product, and they got blamed for everything. Any time a dealer got caught stealing he would invariably try to blame the lost cash or product on his runner. Stevie was often the only voice they had standing up for them, the only thing between them and Nikky.
The runners took huge risks carrying so much drugs and money through the maze of junkies, crackheads, rival dealers, and crooked nigger-hating cops. Stevie had been robbed at gun point on three separate occasions before his father finally relented and bought him gun. Afterward, Stevie considered equipping all of his runners with guns but decided against it. He had begun taking it into his own hands to retire the more incorrigible thieves and he didn’t think it was wise to even up the odds. Killing the traitors who betrayed his trust and made him look bad in the eyes of the other runners by continuing to steal, had become his secret joy. He never told his father about any of his disciplinary actions. He was afraid that the old man wouldn’t approve. Nikky suspected it, he could tell by the way she looked at him, giving him that knowing wink and satisfied grim whenever a new runner popped up to replace one of the old ones who had suddenly come up missing. As far as they were concerned, the runners were under control so they never questioned his methods. As long as the money kept flowing in, everyone was happy.
Stevie still suffered like mad from loneliness. See, he didn’t really belong here. I mean, he did and he didn’t. He had still thought of himself as an angel trying to survive in hell right up until he ate that kid’s brains. Then he began to think of himself as another devil, the worst of them though, a fuckin’ arch demon, but to everyone else, he was still just a White boy.
He looked to his small crew for friendship. The color of his skin, the flat colorless dialect he spoke in, the plain preppie-looking clothes he wore, the way he walked, swaggering like a gunslinger, all branded him as an outsider. Even the way he thought, his disinterest in girls or sports, fighting or dancing or graffiti, his inability to tell a good dirty joke, the type of music he listened to. He liked his father’s old Doors and Beatles albums instead of Run DMC, Public Enemy or Slick Rick. He didn’t even like Prince or Micheal Jackson. Dispite his ridiculous generosity these differences created a wall between him and the other runners. As long as he was paying the way, everyone would show up but when he just wanted to hang out and play video games he often found himself alone. He grew increasingly resentful as parties were planned without him ever receiving an invite or jokes were told that he wasn’t in on. He was mired in the same filth and sin as them but still he was not one of them. He was alone in the very crowd he had brought together. Often, he thought about that long ago kid who had picked on him for sounding like “Richard Pryor doing a
nd impersonantion of a White boy” and tried to alter his voice, his mannerisms and his inflections to imitate their slang. This too was unsuccessful. He was not very good at it and it sounded as if he was making fun of them. Soon, he stopped giving a fuck. He didn’t care if he was loved as long as they feared him, and they did. They all did.
Killing a runner who had claimed to have been robbed of over six thousand dollars was how Stevie first discovered who he was.
“Ay fool! You! Come here!”
“Yo Stevie. W-what’s up?”
The kid was three inches shorter than Stevie and two years younger. He had three gold teeth in his mouth that hadn’t been there the week before and a thick gold rope around his neck. Stevie looked down at the kids feet, he was wearing a brand new pair of Jordons. Rage turned Stevie’s complexion crimson. He could feel something dark and terrible building within him. It was not an unwelcome sensation.
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