Lots of guys my age, even younger, claimed to be gittin’ some. Tryin’ to act like gittin’ some was no big thang, I listened carefully, secretly taking notes.
“See dis?” Victor dangled a set of keys, displaying one key at a time. “Now dis is the key to my woman’s house. See dis? Dis is the key to my woman’s car. Now dis! Dis is the key to my woman’s bank vault.”
Then here comes ol’ Ronnie. “I tell her to call me ‘Daddy.’ She bites her lips, whispers, ‘no no!’ So I keep whammin’ that blam.” Ronnie demonstrates, stands up with gyrating hip thrusts and rhythmic finger poppin’.
“Call me ‘Daddy’!”
“No no!”
“But she keeps gettin’ louder. I cover her mouth so her momma upstairs can’t hear us!”
“Call me ‘Daddy’!”
“She hollers ‘no no,’ biting her lips, tryin’ hard not to say it. But then she suddenly explodes and can’t stop screamin’ ‘DADDY-DADDY-DADDY!’”
Wondering if anyone was telling the truth, I couldn’t imagine lying about such a thing. I tried to act like of course I’m gettin’ some, too. Torturously slow, excruciatingly immature, naive, and sheltered, I was a sitting duck for the more experienced girls, easily taken advantage of.
“Momma, please tell her I ain’t here!” Mom refused to lie for me, so I’d get my brother Mark, five years younger, to get on the phone, tell them off, and hang up. Some never called back. Some called again and again. A few found out where I lived and came over.
“Momma, please tell her I ain’t home!”
“Boy, I’m not going to lie for you!”
From the start, Sunny, a rowdy, rough, popular tenth grader possessed me as her personal property. Mom wouldn’t lie for me. Darting out the back door worked for a while. But Sunny figured it out and posted her sisters at the side and back doors. The sisters caught and surrounded me in my backyard, yelling, “Here he is, girl! He’s back here tryin’ to run out!”
Sunny stomped up to me. “Where were you going, Melvin Carter? You were running away from me, weren’t you?”
“No … um … see—”
“Don’chu’ lie to me, Melvin Carter!” Her fist slammed deep into my belly. I buckled over, gasping for air while she raised clasped hands high and sledgehammered double fists on my back, professional wrestling style. Shocked, amazed, amused, double-clutchin’ for air, I couldn’t stop laughing.
Over time, public beatings became routine every time she saw me. After a few of these ongoing ass whoopin’s, I started play-hitting her back. At this point she realized that I’d continue to take these whoopin’s and not really hit back. To her, these were love taps! I was hers for the next year and a half. I must have enjoyed the whoopin’s! She could make me laugh hard. But I was trapped in a relationship I never wanted. The worst part was every now and then there’d be rumors of Sunny and other girls supposed to fight after school over me. Henry, exasperated with my timidity, said, “Eff her and drop her!” But I think one reason she liked me so much was because her virginity was safe from me.
But then again, gittin’ some was more of an obsessive drive than a matter of virtue or right and wrong. According to Catholics, even thinking about doin’ it was a mortal sin, take ya straight to hell. But wait a minute! Everybody in the Old Testament be gettin’ some, with all that begettin’! And then suddenly in the New Testament, ain’t nobody gettin’ none?
It was probably a golden retriever, but it looked bright red to me. For some reason, that dog hated me. It stalked me whenever I passed its house on the corner of Dayton and Milton. At first it’d just follow me, grumbling, growling, gnashing its teeth, actin’ like it was gonna do somethin’, until I stopped, turned, and stared it down. Then eventually it would leave me alone.
So I’d tiptoe every time I passed the house, but the thing got closer and closer until eventually it lunged to bite me. My foot came up and kicked it hard and high into aerial acrobatics. The thing landed, renewing the attack repeatedly.
Finally two men, a father and son, burst from the house and rushed me, calling me names. “You better get your dog!” I said. But instead they both came at me, fists swinging. Neither could fight, though, let ’lone even hit me. After a brief minimal non-struggle, the son ran back into the house, holding his face with both hands, trying to stop the blood gushing from his nose, weeping audibly.
The father, though, stalled in his tracks, so I backed off, trying to help him save face in front of his family. He looked totally bewildered. Then, more embarrassed than hurt, his eyes glaring, shocked and amazed, he too backed off. His mind was scrambling to understand and justify what had just happened. Then, as if a light in his brain had suddenly come on, out came the words “Black devil!”
He didn’t call me that for the sake of insulting me. He called me that trying to understand why he, his son, and his dog weren’t kickin’ my ass. Some supernatural possession had to be the only explanation. He grabbed the dog and went in the house, slamming the door.
At seventeen, my grades hovered just above barely passing. I had perfected failing techniques down to a scientific art form. I kept two sets of report cards, one for my parents and the other for the school officials, for which I never got caught. But at a parent-teacher association conference, my folks realized that I had volumes of assignments missing. At issue was my reading ability.
By this time, my father was a school custodian, and he was home more often. So he made me read to him every evening after dinner and issued me reading assignments. These assignments consisted mostly of his favorite books growing up, mostly from his Call of the Wild Jack London–type collection, and he’d make me tell him what I read. Every evening he’d hand me the newspaper and lie across the bed with one eye open, the other closed. “READ, BOY!” he’d say.
He made me read everything, sometimes even the want ads. Keenly aware of his breathing, listening for some snoring, I’d set down the paper and tiptoe toward the door. Both his eyes would slam open. “READ, BOY!” I’d hear. Hastily I’d grab the paper, sit down, and continue.
I liked the Jack London stories of dog fights during the gold rush, especially the one where a smaller, heavy-chested dog, built closer to the ground, simply clamped his jaws on the champion dog’s throat and held on until he bled out. But at the same time I loved Charlotte’s Web and Marvel Comics (thanks to my friend Bighead Benny Beebop Lightbulb). I just didn’t read them to my dad.
7
Long Hot Summer
It was 1965, and the civil rights movement was in the air. Racial tensions were thicker than pea soup across America. Every spring, television, newspapers, radios, and politicians everywhere forecast a long, hot summer. “Hot” had little to do with the climate.
So the US government created “Conservation Crews” across America for hard-core inner-city youth. Fort Snelling, where we ended up, was an antiquated military complex surrounded by a vast wilderness of forests, grasslands, and swamps, covering several miles along the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. The area had been declared a state park in 1961. Our assignment was to transform this wilderness into that park.
The job was designed not only to placate our economic desperation (with the minimal wage of $1.25 per hour, which we were happy to get). It was also designed to leave us exhausted by the end of the dirty, back-breaking, eight-hour day. I was plenty strong. Me ’n’ Henry were privately training in his and his brother’s bedroom up on the third floor, an attic remodeled into a dorm. We lifted weights, wrestled, and slap boxed, and our everyday telephone conversation was about how many weight-lifting reps we had done.
The park work was extremely dangerous, though. At fifteen and sixteen years old, still torturously immature, without training, and with minimal supervision, we grabbed sledgehammers, axes, pickaxes, saws, and dangerous chemicals and headed out to the deep forest—digging ditches, chopping down trees. We’d split and shape huge blocks of stones and align them as stairsteps up and down steep inclines. Hauling the st
ones, dirt, and tree stumps was as big an operation as cutting them. The trucks were all heavily rusted, with no shortage of cutting edges. The “pulley truck” was a powerful rust-bucket contraption, but its doorknobs had long been broken off, leaving sharp protruding spikes.
Cherry Lips had been standing on the runners on the driver’s side when the truck started rolling downhill, throwing him off balance. Attempting not to get thrown, he grabbed the door, thrusting the rusty sharp dagger into his belly and ripping his stomach from side to side.
They threw him into the back of another rattling rust-bucket truck, and off they went. Anyone ever thrown “on the truck” was never seen or heard from again—that is, except for me. Once when I had been working in a swamp highly infested with mosquitoes, I managed to get a full blast of industrial-strength insecticide in my face. They raced me to a nearby facility, rinsed out my eyes, and sent me back to work.
The very sight of me irked the enormous pinheaded foreman. “Get over here, Bosko!” he’d yell. Bosko was a black, monkey-like, nonhuman cartoon character.
The foreman must have fired me a dozen times. In front of the entire work crew, he’d shout, “Carter, you’re done! Get your stuff and get out of here! Report to Mr. Johnson now!”
Without acknowledging Pinhead, I’d announce to the fellas, “I shall return!”
Mr. Johnson seemed to like me. “Damnit, Carter! You back again?” he’d ask.
My do-rag had already been removed. The SPC nuns had taught me well how to present myself to adults. I’d project my innocent choirboy look, invoking my voice of reason. “You see, Mr. Johnson, it’s understandable that he thought I had something to do with it, but … blah, blah, blah … and I harbor no ill feelings.” Mr. Johnson always sent me back to work. “Okay, Carter, but I don’t want to see you for the rest of this week!”
It was a routine sweltering slow-poking-fast-moving day. We had just finished splitting huge stones with sledgehammers and chisels. Then we backed the truck over a stone, rolled the pulley directly over it, and lowered the chain. Calvin and Judd used long pry bars to lift one end at a time while Shorty and Craig worked thick heavy chains underneath and around it. Once we locked it in place, it took five or six of us to hoist the stone up, roll it over and above the flatbed, then reverse the pulley action and guide it down.
Me ’n’ Arlan stood on the flatbed of the heavy-duty truck while Tommy Brown happened to be sitting on the cab of the truck smoking a cigarette. The ground crew of five guys had hoisted a freshly cut mattress-shaped stone onto the flatbed, guiding it with long thick chrome steel chains. Arlan and I were guiding it to its intended resting place. Suddenly something snapped or someone slipped. It went out of control.
“Heads up!—Watch out!—Watch out!” Echoes of loud metal-to-metal grinding chimed with the sound of sliding chains. Then the noise stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Hot red blood splashed wet on the front of my already filthy T-shirt. Tommy’s right hand had been smashed inside the pulley mechanism. The impact had thrown Arlan to the ground, leaving only me and Tommy.
“Help me! Somebody! Get it off, please!” Sheer agony in his voice.
Something gave me the strength to lift up the entire contraption—pulley and chains with the mattress-sized stone—and roll it off his hand as if it were weightless. (Calvin Jones later estimated the weight at about a quarter ton; the foreman estimated even more.) Tommy jumped down and did the agony dance in circles until they threw him on the back of the truck and sped off. Ironically, his middle finger had been hurled about a car length away, resting in the straight-up position as if it were giving us the finger or, as some say, “shooting us the bird.”
My way of processing trauma was to keep moving. After Tommy’s accident, I went home, took off my blood-soaked T-shirt, put on my Ban-Lon shirt, and went to the pool hall, which I did almost every night. Pool halls were considered dangerous places for very bad boys. A day in the life consisted of comedy, loud talkin’, posturing, showdowns, standoffs, fist-fights, and a stabbing or shooting once or twice a year. The pool hall was where we socialized after school, sometimes not getting home until after ten o’clock.
The pool hall was run and operated by a rack man instead of coin-operated tables. “Rack man!” or “Next!” announced the winner and was in everybody’s crap-talking arsenal. And then there was “The Dozens.”
Your momma don’t wear no drawers
I saw her when she took ’em off
She put ’em in the washa’ machine
And it refused to clean
She put ’em out on the line
The sun refused to shine.
Late one night on Selby Avenue in front of the pool hall, a pretty Minneapolis girl gravitated to me, trailed me as I moved down the avenue. Out of nowhere, Razor Slingin’ Slim slid up to me and got in my face, accusing me of following him and his woman, squaring off. Slim was rather tall, sporting a huge Adam’s apple and an extra-greasy do-rag. He was known for brandishing a straight razor and always slithered like a cobra.
Me ’n’ Henry were obsessively protective of one another. Our ongoing argument was over who was the big cousin and who was the little cousin, and which protected the other. I, exactly six months older, was leaner and had better muscle definition. But Henry, a couple inches taller, several pounds heavier, was bigger chested, with wider, beefier shoulders and darker, glistening stallion-like muscles.
Henry, perceiving a threat to his little cousin, took an offensive position at my side. The viper encroached. Henry’s elbow gently nudged me aside, stepping between me and Slim.
Now the threat was to my little cousin (since I was the oldest). So I nudged Henry aside. Protecting one another, me ’n’ Henry shoved each other out of Slim’s slashing range. Slim shoved me hard. Henry stepped aside, giving me the gift. “Okay, Cahta-babe” (his personal nickname for me). “He’s yours.”
Guff, as usual, emerged from the crowd and whispered from behind, “I got chu! Get ’im now!”
I never carried any weapon. (“No, Melvin!” Mr. Nins’s voice was in my head. “A weapon can be taken away from you and used against you. Your weapon must be one that can’t be taken from you or used against you.”)
My hands never let Slim’s razor out of his pocket. He was still reaching for it when his torso slammed into the building, then buckled onto the pavement between the curb and a parked car. My foot was cramming him underneath the car when Henry and Guff pulled me off. Guff was partially holding me up, guiding me down Selby Avenue. “Get out of here now,” he said.
And so it went: where there was mischief, there I was also. My biggest crime was being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong crowd. Me ’n’ Henry and a group of fellaz he knew banded together and called ourselves “Thee Boyz,” referring to ourselves as an organization (not a gang). Although we were just as treacherous as anyone else, if not more, we dressed rather Ivy League: sweaters with elbow patches and Hush Puppies shoes, in order not to fit the police profiles. Hush Puppies looked like dress shoes, but they were light and flexible like tennis shoes, allowing us to fight, run, jump, climb fences—and escape. So rivals appeared. There’d be fisticuffs (no weapons). Because we kind of dressed like “squares” and knew how to bullshit the police, they’d always presume us to be innocent. We would rent space, hire bands, and throw big parties—entrance fee twenty-five cents. Pretty girls got in free. Rivals denied admittance waited outside for us after the party. Then there’d be street fights.
Old-fashioned bare-knuckle fistfighting became my way of equalizing against the world. Mom said I had a death wish. Dad said, “Boy! Why are you so blind temperamental? Somebody’s gonna knock that chip off your shoulder someday. At the rate you goin’, you’ll never reach twenty-one!” There’d be a stabbing, a razor slicing, or a shooting, but somehow I always managed not to be there when the worst stuff happened.
It was three o’clock in the morning. Curfew was at eleven PM. I was seventeen, trying to sneak in the front do
or. “Here he is, Chick!” Mom slammed the telephone onto the receiver. They rushed to the door, hugging me at first. They had called the police department, all the local hospitals, and even the morgue looking for me. They were filled with relief and mad as hell.
They held me against the wall. “Check his arms, Chick! See if the boy is on dope!” Dad snatched my arm, inspecting it for needle tracks, and found a blemish.
“Yeah, Honey! I think I see a track!”
I guess dope would have been an explanation, but dope robbed me of my ability to think, connive, and scheme and to function under pressure. Besides, I was too scared of needles and loved my body too much to poke holes in myself.
It was finally the long hot summer night. You know, the kind that media always predicted every summer?
Even though I was there from the beginning as things unfolded and even took part to some extent, who really knows what actually sparked it? Central High had lost the night game to some all-white school. Someone shouted, “Lose the game, win the fight!” All hell broke loose—buildings burning, cars on fire, hostile skirmish lines between police and taunting crowds fluctuating north ’n’ south. At some point, there were National Guard soldiers, Jeeps, and armored vehicles scurrying up and down Selby Avenue between Lexington and Dale Street.
The violence escalated. The pigs were holding down a position at Selby and Dale, pushing the crowd north toward Dayton Avenue. In slow motion, a cop reached inside a squad car, then came out brandishing a shotgun. He pointed it in our direction. We all saw it at the same time. For a brief moment of eternity, everything was first still, then went into slow motion as we fled northbound on Dale Street in a panic-stricken frenzy. There was no sound, even when a bright muzzle flash lit up the night. My ears continued listening for the delayed report of the boom.
Freddie, Charlie, Ronnie, Guff, and them were all super-duper track stars. Normally I could hardly keep up with them, let alone outrun them and leave them in the dust. But somehow my feet found a new gear. I felt guilty stepping directly in front of my dear friends so that the bullet would hit them instead of me, but I did it. I saw the muzzle flash, then felt the concussion of the bang. I stopped, gasped for breath, searched for bullet holes. Finding none, I went home.
Diesel Heart Page 6
