When I woke up I was in a hospital and my Mom was beside me screaming and crying in hysterics.
“You muthafuckin’ evil bastard! You hurt my baby! If he ain’t alright I swear to God you’re a dead muthafucka! You hear me, nigga?! You’s dead muthafucka!” My mother was standing right in Pop’s face. Her 5’11” looked every bit as formidable as his 6’2”; her arms just as sinuous, her afro just as wild and woolly, her eyes shooting napalm. She had a mother’s instinctive fury when her offspring is threatened and even a bad muthafucka like Pops found himself humbled by it. His head was bowed and his hands were clasped in front of him fidgeting nervously. His eyes were red and full of tears (Though none would ever spill down his cheeks. He was too damned proud for that.) He kept casting worried looks in my direction throughout Mom’s diatribe.
“Baby, I’m sorry. You know I’d never hurt that boy on purpose. See, look. His eyes are open. He’s all right, baby…” He looked desperate and Mom wasn’t going for it.
“What? You some fuckin’ kind of doctor now? How tha fuck do you know he’s all right?” She spat, glowering at him with her fierce bloodshot eyes.
“How’s my baby? Don’t worry Momma’s gonna take care of you. Aw, look at your beautiful face. Look what that bastard did to your pretty face!”
I didn’t care what he had done to my face. To me, my face wasn’t no big deal anyway. Round and pudgy instead of hard and lean like the cowboys and gangsters on television. I was more concerned with what he had done to her face. It was bruised and swollen, a huge black and purple hematoma covered her right eye, her lip was split open and plumped to the size of a ping-pong ball.
I cried when I looked at the damage my father had done. He had vandalized her. Beat a reckless graffiti of welts and bruises across her flawless face. I hated myself for letting him see me cry. This man who had taught me that men never cried. Who had broken me out of my fear of water by holding my head an inch above the seawater so that the waves would crash into me as they rolled in and held me like that until I finally stopped crying five or ten minutes later. Who had taught me to fight in preschool by punching the shit out of me and making me punch him back while ordering me not cry. Who goaded me into my first fight at age four, a dispute over a goddamned tricycle, and patted me on the back when I beat a bigger, older boy viciously without shedding a tear and without stopping until I saw blood even when he was down, despite the kid’s blubbering apology and pleads for mercy. But I wasn’t crying for me. I was crying for him. Because I loved him, because I admired him, the coolest dad on the block, and because I knew I was gonna have to kill him someday. And because I knew Mom would miss him.
Mom gingerly inspected my contusions letting me know that my nose was broken and that two of my teeth were missing. Baby teeth. They would grow back. I’d also received a concussion and for years afterward Mom would blame it for all of my madness. Softly I caressed her blackened eye and savaged lip with my tiny fingertips as the tears flowed freely down my face. Her tears began to flow also. I turned to glare into Pop’s face and was amazed to find that he couldn’t meet my gaze, cowed by the weight of his own guilt. He bowed his head and shuffled out of the room cursing to hisself as if his foul mouth could fight off his shame. My eyes followed him right out the door. I was no longer afraid to show my tears. I displayed them proudly; this small rebellion against his will.
“If he ever hurts you again I’m gonna kill ’im, Mom. I swear Momma, I’ll kill ’im if he hurts you again!” I broke down and my quiet tears became racking sobs as Moms held me in her arms. She rocked me, humming softly, until I fell asleep. As I lay snoring in her lap, she began to wonder what life would be like as a single parent.
She left him a few years later when I was eight years old and moved in with my grandmother. Grandma was a bible thumping Baptist, 40 pounds overweight with bad knees, arthritis in her hands, gray hair, extremely hypocritical and judgmental as the devout tend to be, but loving and tolerant almost doting with me even if she could not extend the same compassion and understanding to her own child. I was her first born grandson and as such I could do no wrong. Life with her was great. She and Mom fought a lot but it never got violent like with Darryl (I no longer called him Pop and never would again.)
Fighting had become a sort of hobby with me. It was the only thing I was good at. My mother and grand mother were constantly forced into the position of consoling parents whose children had received a taste of my wrath. The older kids and the big-time players who hung out in front of the corner store selling weed and talkin’ shit used to bet on my fights and sometimes pay me to beat up other little kids just to give them something to watch.
My very first day in the neighborhood I got into it with an older boy.
“Hey, little bro. You need some new kicks and bad. Them sneaks you got on are so dogged out that they’s barkin’!” He laughed.
The kid had been riding by my porch on a Huffy mountain bike and had stopped in the middle of the street just to diss me about my worn out sneakers. Someone else’s poverty was not something you joked about in the ghetto. I rose from that stoop knowing that we were going to brawl.
He probably mistook me for an older kid because of my size and wanted to try to improve his rep by being the first one on the block to beat up the new kid.
He was about ten years-old, three years older than me, ink black, skinny as a famine victim, and wore his hair in a wild afro. He had bucked teeth and big lips and probably had a chip on his shoulder about it. So naturally I made them the focus of my verbal assault.
“Fuck your old buck-toothed Donald Duck lookin’ ass!”
The bigger kid was off his bike and at my throat in half a second.
“What tha fuck did you call me?”
I didn’t really want to tangle with this older kid so I decided to let him know how young I was.
“Man you a punk! Messin’ with an eight year-old kid as big as you is!”
He wasn’t going for it though and he punched me right in my mouth. I fell over and he dove on top of me preparing for the ground and pound, but some teenagers who were hangin’ out on the corner caught the whole exchange and luckily intervened on my behalf.
“Yo, Sid! Man, don’t be messin’ with that little kid. Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”
They gathered around us and pulled him off of me, but not before he delivered two more blows to my head. While they held him I jumped up and punched him right in the stomach, doubling him over. The teenagers all laughed.
“This a tough little thug right here! He took that ass whuppin’ and he ain’t even cryin’. I remember how Sid used to cry like a little bitch every time somebody got in his ass.”
Sid wanted to jump on me again, but the other kids held him back.
“Don’t even fuck with him Sid ’cause you shouldn’t have started with him in the first place. Now ya’ll are even.”
“Naw fuck that!” Sid shrieked in a high-pitched falsetto whine that raked my nerves. “I ain’t lettin’ this little bitch get away with that! I’ll let my little brother kick his ass. They both the same size. Yo, Jay!”
Sid pulled free from the other boys and called to some kids up the street who were racing Hot Wheels cars down a large pile of dirt that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk for some inecsplicable reason in front of a burnt out house. The biggest one of them lifted his head and looked our way. Jay was a carbon copy of his brother, big lips, bucked teeth and all. He was slightly smaller than his older sibling though still larger than me. He was perhaps only a year younger than his older brother. He trotted over wearing brand new shell-top Adidas and a red and white Sixers jersey.
“Jay, take care of my light work!”
He pointed towards me and I looked at the older boys for help, but apparently this was all fair and honorable to them because they backed off to give us room to fight, forming a loose circle around us. I looked back over at my grandmother’s house and was amused to see her and my mother still unloading the U-haul truck. We hadn’t even moved in good yet and here I was already about to get into a fight. My mom probably thought I was playing innocently and was no doubt happy to see how quickly I was making friends.
I knew I could have gotten myself out of all that drama just by calling for her, but then these kids would have thought I was a punk and a mama’s boy. In retrospect, that may not have been such a bad thing. Instead I took the first step on the road to building one of the most fearsome reputations the G had ever known. I stepped up to that kid like I was the baddest little muthafucka on the planet.
“If I win, I’m takin’ those sneaks.” I said pointing down at his shiny new Adidas.
“You ain’t gonna win, punk!” he replied and as far as I was concerned that was as good as a handshake.
