I produced a pen and I couldn’t find a matchbook so she wrote her number on the back of a pack of rolling papers and handed it to me.
“You smoke weed?”
“I sell weed now that my Mom bounced on me. That’s how I’m payin’ the bills while I’m goin’ to college.”
I laughed to myself at the way she tried to incorporate my slang into her dialogue.
“Yeah, well why don’t you sell me a couple dimes so I can get my boy’s head straight?”
“I’ll give you some if you come by tonight.”
“Cool, I’ll be there.”
She slipped me a fat-ass sack of green bud. The kind of shit nobody can get in Philly. The smell alone was starting to get me high.
“Where the fuck did you get this from?”
“My sister lives in Northern California, in Marin County, and her fiancé grows the shit.”
“You a little hustler, huh? Yeah, we’re most definitely gonna hook up.”
I caught up to Huey and we walked around the corner, back to the Impala. We drove over to the State Store on Second Street. State Stores, as the name implies, are run by the State of Pennsylvania and are the only legal place where you can buy liquor in Philly.
We were both still under age so we had to bribe this old derelict into going in there for us. We bought a bottle of M.D. 20/20 and some Tangueray. Then we went to the corner store and bought some orange juice and a couple forties of Colt 45.
We snuck the orange juice and the Tangueray into a movie theatre on Chestnut Street and kicked back to watch Steven Seagal’s overweight ass do some weak Aikido moves while his gut protruded over his jeans and with arms as skinny as a woman’s wrist. We were so high that we were actually enjoying it though.
“Look at that fat mutherfucker. I’d whoop that bitch’s ass!” Huey whooped at the screen.
A fight broke out in the back of the theater and for once we didn’t get involved and make shit worse. We turned our backs on the movie screen to watch two gangs of kids just a few years younger than us threaten each other loudly without throwing a blow. It went on for almost twenty minutes before fists finally began to fly.
“Either start throwing or shut the fuck up so we can watch the damn movie!” an Old Gangsta yelled from the front while his girlfriend—who was decked in fur, platinum, and enough ice to chill a twelve pack— hugged his side.
Once it began it lasted less than a minute. The smaller group was chased out of the theater by the larger group and we all just went back to watching the movie.
An hour and a half passed before we staggered out of the theater and piled back into my Impala. We were torn down from the Tangueray and juice, but we were still not high enough to stop thinking about Tank. As soon as the movie ended the image of him lying in that casket came rushing back to us. We started talking to keep our minds off of it.
Huey seemed to be in a much better mood. We laughed and joked as we drove down the Parkway and onto Kelly Drive. The Schuykill River was the same shit brown it had always been, yet in our intoxicated state, with the setting sun sparkling over the waters, it looked like the most tranquil and beautiful place on earth. We pulled into a parking area along the riverfront and cracked open the Mad Dog.
Huey and I sat there for hours talking about nothing. Anytime the memory of Tank’s murder tried to intrude its way back into my consciousness I would tell a joke or something. But it was unavoidable. Eventually the conversation lulled and we both started thinking about Tank.
Tears streamed down our faces as we drained the bottle of MD and reminisced about our dead brother.
“Why don’t you roll up some of that Cali weed you got from that gray bitch? I ain’t fucked up enough yet,” Huey slurred.
I pulled out the baggy and the box of papers and rolled us the fattest joint I could manage. We lit up and passed it back and forth as we watched the sun crash into the horizon and explode across the sky in fiery reds and oranges.
“Tank would have loved this shit. You know how that nigga loved his weed.”
“Yeah, he stayed high. I don’t know how he could function as much weed as he smoked.”
“I remember one time we were doin’ a driveby on these JBGL muthafuckas and Tank had just lit up this fat ass joint. So we roll up along side these niggas and Tank pulls the AK out of his lap and while he’s swinging it out the window he knocks the joint out his mouth. You know that crazy muthafucka puts the AK down to pick up the joint? By the time he picked the rifle up again them fools had scattered. I laughed my ass off. Scratch was mad as hell that night and Tank just looked at him like ‘Hey, shit happens,’ and kept on smoking his blunt.”
Huey and I laughed hard at that even as the tears continued to fall. When we finally left the river I could hardly see straight I was so high.
“Damn, that was some good weed!”
“Hell yeah it was. Maybe I was wrong about that gray bitch. She might come in handy after all. Where you want to go now?”
“You ready to go back ’round the way?”
“Naw, ain’t shit to see there now. Besides, I don’t want to go watch my mom cry or deal with Iesha askin’ me a bunch of annoying ass questions trying to get me to express my feelings and shit. Don’t bitches realize that men ain’t like that? The last thing a man wants to do when he’s depressed is sit around and talk about why he’s depressed. You just want to forget about that shit. Get high. Get fucked. Whatever. You just want to forget. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“True indeed. Let’s just drive around for a while then.”
I hadn’t intended on driving back to the cemetery but somehow we both knew that was where we were going. We pulled through the gates of the Cheltenham Cemetery just as twilight darkened into night.
There were no lights in the cemetery. Huey and I staggered around in the dark for the better part of an hour trying to find Tank’s grave. Since we hadn’t attended the burial we didn’t even have the faintest clue which direction to look in and checking each headstone with no illumination except my disposable Bic lighter was tedious.
Huge gravestones, monuments, and crypts the size of small garages crammed every corner of the century old cemetery casting eerie shadows that recalled memories of old horror movies. We were so intoxicated that we were actually enjoying the search and the crawling superstitious dread that followed us as we stomped on earth beneath which the dead slumbered. We giggled as we tripped over gravestones and bumped into the large statues that marked many of the older graves.
“This is the older section. He ain’t buried over here. He should be over there where all those little plaques are.”
We were in total darkness by the time we found Tank’s modest little headstone, which was little more than a plaque stuck in the ground as Huey had said. We collapsed upon it in exhaustion and cracked open our forties. I eulogized our brother in my own way as Huey stared on in silence.
“I remember how we all met. Remember how we almost killed each other and then wound up becoming best friends? Who’d have believed that shit? We terrorized that neighborhood so bad them niggas ain’t never gonna forget you. I won’t ever forget you, bro. You were my dog, my brother. Even if we didn’t share the same blood or come out of the same womb we shared the same spirit, the same soul. We been tighter than any two muthafuckas ever could be. We fought together. We laughed together. We got high together. We killed together. After all that time it was just in the last two or three days that I really got to know your big ass. I loved you man. You was one bad ass-kickin’ muthafucka and the game won’t be the same without you. I’m gonna miss you, bro.”
We poured our forties out on his grave.
“I wish there was some way we could have gotten him a cheesesteak hoagie to take on his journey. I know he’s hungry. That nigga’s always hungry.”
“I was just thinking about planting some weed on his grave. That would guarantee everybody from the hood would visit him.”
I stared at Tank’s modest li
ttle gravestone and something about it started to annoy me. They had put Tank’s real name on it, Anthony Turner, instead of the name by which he was known to all his friends and family. I took out a paint marker and wrote over the name in big silver letters; “Tank”.
“Rest in peace, my brother.”
We laid down on Tank’s grave, resting our heads on his stone. We rolled up some more of the weed and I took the seeds out and planted them in front of the headstone. We both inhaled deeply, choking and coughing, as we watched the clouds uncover the moon and the few stars that were visible through the city pollution wink on and off like Christmas lights. We were both wondering if Tank’s soul had made it into heaven.
“I hope Tank is up there kickin’ God’s ass right now.”
“Man, don’t say shit like that, Snap.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause it ain’t cool to be talkin’ about God like that.”
“Don’t tell me you still into all that Muslim shit? I thought you gave that shit up when the Trade Center got smoked.”
“Man, don’t start dissin’ my faith. You could stand to have Allah in your heart.”
“No offence my brother, but Allah has done about as much for the Black man as any of these other gods, which is to say not a damn thing. You might as well be Catholic or Jewish for all the good any of that shit does.”
“Allah is the only way we can save the Black community. If Tank had been down with it he might still be here today.”
“Tank was down with the only God that ever helped anybody out ’round the way, the all-mighty dollar fuckin’ bill. But let’s not get into this. You don’t want to have this conversation with me now, Huey. You might get your feelings hurt. I just wish there really was a God up there. At least then I’d have somebody to blame for all this shit. It’d fuck me up to think we brought all this shit on ourselves and that White folks were able to fuck our shit up for hundreds of years without any help from the Great White overseer in the sky.”
“See, that’s just what your problem is. You always lookin’ to blame somebody else rather than admit that you’re responsible for your own fucked up destiny. Now, I ain’t sayin’ them White devils ain’t conspired at every turn to keep the Black man on his knees. You know that don’t nobody hate crackers more than I do. I’m just sayin’ that brothers have sabotaged themselves so much that it ain’t been hard for them to do it. And if it wasn’t for Allah, the God of the Black man, who loves and protects us despite our ignorant self-destructive behavior, we would have never survived half the shit them devils have put our people through.”
“Naw, man. It don’t work that way. I mean I hear what you sayin’ and all, but it don’t work. See ’cause this Black God who’s supposed to love Black people, he created White People. And Yeah, I know you’re gonna say that Satan or Dr. Yaccub or some aliens from space created White folks, but see god created Satan and if there are aliens then God created them too. If God is truly all knowing then when he created Satan, before he created Satan, he knew the man would rebel against him and create White people and that they would oppress and enslave black people. So if God knew what Yaccub or Satan or whatever was gonna do, but he created these muthafuckas anyway, than he’s directly responsible for what happened to Black Folks as a result. And I ain’t even sayin’ I believe that all White people are devils. I’m just sayin’ that, based on your theories, that’s what you get. If they were all devils then there wouldn’t be any nice ones. They would all be evil, but there’s no more evil ones as far as I can see than there are evil niggas.”
“You just sayin’ that shit ’cause you bouts to try and fuck one of them devils. Muthafucka gets a little weed in him and wants to start getting’ all philosophical,” Huey laughs, “Okay, Socrates, what about personal responsibility? What about free will? Maybe nobody knew what damage these White devils would do until after they were created because of the unpredictability of free will. And Dr. Yaccub was a man too. Maybe God couldn’t predict what he would do either.”
“How unpredictable are most muthafuckas you know? Free will ain’t that fucking confusing that it should throw off even a muthafucka of average intelligence let alone a muthafucka that’s supposed to be all-knowing. I could drive through this city and tell you who a muthafucka is gonna vote for in the next election just by the size of their house, the car they drive, and the neighborhood they live in. People just ain’t that deep. If God is all-knowin’ then free will is an illusion anyway because he already knows everything you’re ever going to do, every decision you will ever make, before you ever make them, before he ever even created you. Because that’s what all-knowin’ is, knowin’ all! Not knowin’ most or knowin’ some, knowin’ all. So if he created you knowin’ everything you would do then you could say that he created you to do those things because he had the choice not to create you. See what I’m sayin’?”
“How you figure? You lost me, my brother.”
“Put it this way. Suppose you was takin’ the Pepsi Challenge. You remember that right? When there’d be this little guy at a booth and they’d have a glass of Pepsi and a glass of Coke and you were supposed to taste it and pick the one that you liked best?”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember that shit. So what?”
“Now if God knew before you ever sat down to take that test that you would choose Coke instead of Pepsi and he would know because he created your very nature and the environment that shaped your character plus he’s all-knowin’ and infallible, could you then choose Pepsi and prove God wrong? See, because if God can be wrong then he ain’t perfect. He ain’t omnipotent. So if God knew you would choose Coke before he ever created your ass, what sense does it make to say you had the free-will to chose Pepsi if you had wanted to? When God knew that you wouldn’t want to? It wouldn’t make sense. That’s what I’m sayin’. Since God already knows every decision you’re going to make then free will is an illusion and he is ultimately responsible for every evil in the world. Since he created it all, he’s the first ’cause, then he’s to blame ultimately.
“I mean if God knew that Hitler would kill eight million Jews before he ever created him then could Hitler have decided not to kill Jews or if God thought Hitler would just be a shoe salesman could Hitler have fooled God and gone out to kill Jews instead? Would you really want to worship a creator with so little control over his creations that some little punk like Hitler could fake him out? That would mean God wasn’t omnipotent or all-knowin’ and not really even all that smart. And if God knew that if he created Hitler what the man would do and he had the option of creating a Hitler who wouldn’t kill Jews, I mean if Hitler had been born in the Bronx in nineteen eighty I don’t think he’d have started World War II, or he could have not created him at all, but if God did do all this knowingly then he ain’t really such a nice muthafucka is he? The same thing with White folks, if God knew that the White man would murder, rape, enslave, and oppress the Black man for centuries, yet he created him anyway then just like they say in court, he ‘acted willfully and with malicious aforethought’ and caused the oppression of our people through his action or inaction. It’s his fault so how could you have any love in your heart for him? The muthafucka gets no love from me. None.”
“So you sayin’ God is either evil or stupid?”
“That’s exactly what the fuck I’m sayin’. If God is supposed to be all powerful then he could end the plight of the Black man at any time. He could have prevented it from ever occurring in the first place. You feel me, bro? He could end poverty and crime. He could get niggas good jobs so we didn’t have to kill each other to survive. But he don’t do he? Why? ’Cause he don’t give a fuck about us that’s why. We live like this because of him so how can you be worshipping him? It’s like worshipping the slavemaster’s whip. It don’t make no sense!”
“My brother, you is one to talk.”
“So, what you sayin’?”
“I’m sayin’ you contribute to the hardships of the Black community by h
elping Scratch pump that poison, but you still expect people to love you.”
I sat bolt upright in the grass.
“Fuck that! Nigga, I don’t expect nobody to love me!”
I knew Huey hated for anyone to call him “nigga”, even though he often used the word himself. It was part of that Black Consciousness thing he was into. But he had pushed my buttons so he deserved to have a few pushed back. I took some small pleasure in watching him struggle to ignore my use of the word.
“Yeah, you do. You expect your Mom to love you. You expect your Grandma to love you,” He pointed to the grave on which we sat and I winced, “You expected my brother to love you…and you expect me to love you. Now tell me I’m wrong?”
It was weird to hear another man say he loved me, even if he was like a brother or whatever. But I knew I loved him too. He had always been like family to me.
“Yeah, Huey, but it ain’t the same.”
“Ain’t it, Snap?”
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