Scratch pointed the gun at the whore’s stomach and pulled the trigger twice, blowing its contents onto the opposite door. The whore’s aborted fetus flopped out onto the floor of the BMW along with much of her intestines.
He took another hit from the pipe then put the gun to the woman’s temple and voided her brains onto the car window. He reached across the woman’s corpse to open the car door. An avalanche of blood poured from her stomach wound, her mouth, nose, ears, and the hole in her temple. Her body flopped around in the seat, convulsing in its death throes. The driver shook his head in disgust looking back over the front seat at the dead prostitute bleeding all over the leather upholstery.
“I hope to hell you don’t think I’m cleaning that shit up! Why’d you have to do that shit in the car?”
“Fuck it. I’ll buy a new one.”
The drug dealer opened the car door and kicked the prostitute’s brutalized corpse out onto the sidewalk where it continued to kick and spasm. He reached down and picked the fetus up from where it lay half under the front seat. It had been nearly decapitated by the gunshot to its mother’s belly. He held it up to his face and examined it closely.
“That’s fuckin’ nasty, yo! What the hell are you lookin’ at that thing for?”
Scratch tossed the dead baby out of the car onto the sidewalk beside its mother.
“Just fuckin’ drive.”
— | — | —
Chapter 1
—DMX
««—»»
I bite down on the barrel. I never liked the way metal tasted, especially not gun metal and not a gun that’s been used as much as mine. I can still taste sulfur and gunpowder on the steel. I can taste the oil from its last cleaning. My teeth grate against the metal and a sound like metal in a blender rakes through my skull. I try to imagine what the bullet will feel like. If there will be pain before oblivion.
Che` Guevera said
“I’m going to blow my fucking head off!”
I said it aloud for my own benefit. I needed to hear it. I wasn’t trying to shock anyone. There’s no one else in the house but me. I just wanted to see if I could actually say it. If I could mouth the words around the gun barrel. To test the depths of my conviction. I felt as if I needed to get the words out before the gun would fit properly.
I slip my finger onto the trigger. I’m still not ready. There’s still more words inside of me. Words that have to be spoken before I pump this last shell into my skull and rid the world of another young monster. You’ve got to know why this is necessary.
I reach over and turn on the old tape recorder. It whirs to life and I let out a deep sigh. I open my mouth to speak but the only things that come out of me are tears. They shame me. Not because I think they make me weaker or less of a man, but because I have no right to them. Not after all the pain I’ve caused.
It takes me a few more minutes to get myself back under control before I can continue. I press rewind on the tape recorder and erase the sound of my self-pity. That’s at least one secret I will keep to myself. I press play again.
I’m going to tell you about evil. It’s a long involved story and it damn sure ain’t pretty, but it’s something I’ve got to tell, something you’ve got to hear. Because I want you to hate it like I do. I want you to fight it, in the world and in yourself. Because there’s evil everywhere. Every-fucking-where.
The story has to begin with me because I’m part of it. I’m a great big fucking part of it.
My name is Malik Black. I was born in Philadelphia’s Germantown section. G-town. The ghetto. A slightly nicer ghetto than some of the others in Philadelphia, but a ghetto nonetheless. My shocked and appalled little body was evicted screaming and protesting from my mother’s womb as the summer died and gave birth to fall in September of 1985. I grew up during the height of the drug epidemic or war or whatever the fuck you want to call it. By the time I was old enough to walk the streets unchaperoned they were already tacky with blood, crunchy with broken crack viles, beer bottles, and hypodermic needles, filthy with spent shell casings and wasted dreams. I was carrying a gun myself by the age of ten.
Around the way they called me “Snap” because my temper was as quick as my trigger finger. I’d have fit right in in the Wild West. I killed my first human being at the age of twelve. I’d like to tell you it was something I had to do, that my back was against the wall and I had no other choice. But we’ve all got choices. I killed because I wanted to.
Everybody thinks I’m crazy. I probably am. I didn’t start out as a killer though. None of us did. The psychotropic depressant of ghetto life, of waking up everyday to watch the roaches scurry from the morning light and the crack whores scamper to catch the last trick of the day, of going to sleep to the sound of gunfire and the cries and curses of domestic violence, altered critical nuero-pathways in my brain warping an otherwise civilized human being into the hardened gangsta I am now.
Perhaps I am a bad seed genetically predisposed to murder, some mad scientist’s joke on the world like Scratch said. Some may argue that I inherited my rage from my father and all the generations of angry black men that preceded him. I don’t know what the truth is anymore. Nothing makes sense.
I didn’t vivisect animals in my basement, set fire to old folk’s homes, or read crime novels and dream of infamy. I wasn’t the only thing that went wrong with my generation. It was the entire decade in which I was born that was hostile and deranged and I simply conformed to this fucked up climate, instinctively acting for the preservation of self. But even that might be a lie. It’s possible, that I started it all, if not now then generations ago, eons ago.
It should have been no surprise that the rage, violence, hatred, and hopelessness of G-town, the same place that gave birth to me, would have drawn an even greater evil to it. That worse things than our little gang would be attracted to the heat of gunfire, the screams of the dying, and the rivers of blood that ran down the street gutters like worthless sewage. G-town was the nexus of all realities. It’s where all the shit landed in Philadelphia when it fell.
But how would we have spotted a monster amongst the madness we lived in everyday? Most of my friends were murderers, thieves, drug dealers. Some were rapists. Some were worse. You pick out the monster. I had bodies on me too. None of us were angels.
Now, it’s easy to see Scratch for what he really is. Hindsight is pretty damn near omniscient. But back then dude just looked like one of us. Like just another pissed off thug. We were so busy doing our own evil we wouldn’t have recognized Satan if he’d been sitting right beside us waiting for us to pass him a blunt or a forty, which he often was. Yeah, I brought the devil to his throne in G-town. But I was the one who sent his ass back to hell too.
Of course Scratch was well on his way to becoming a serious ghetto star when I met him in that old lot on Cherokee Street five years ago. With my help though, he became a superstar.
««—»»
Germantown, sitting like a jungle cat waiting to spring on the Northwest side of Philadelphia, wasn’t what you would call hell. That was further east in North Philadelphia. But it was a hellacious place for us impressionable youths to learn the ways of the world. I often wonder how my perspective might have been different if I had grown up in Cherry Hill New Jersey or some lily-white suburb on the Main Line. How long would it have taken me to learn to hate? In Germantown we were weaned on violence and hatred. My boy Huey liked to say that when kids are born in the ghetto the doctors smacked them until they stopped crying.
G-town was where all the Black folks from North Philly moved when they started making a little bank and got bold enough to attempt to improve their living conditions. It was pure futility really because as soon as Black families moved in the white families moved out, the city began to neglect the neighborhood, allowing it to fall into
