“Bet!” I said and began swinging hooks at his head as hard and fast as I could surprising myself by landing more than I missed. He tried to swing back, but his punches were smothered by the deluge of blows I was raining down on him. I started kicking at him too and pretty soon he was turning to run. I tackled him and threw him in a headlock.
“Now give up those sneaks or I’m gonna tear your head off!” I was jerking on his neck and dragging him around the street. He was crying and calling for his brother, but the older boys were once again holding Sid back.
“Your brother ain’t helping you, fool! Now take them sneaks off! I ain’t playin!”
He took them off and I took them home. When my mom asked me where I had gotten them from I told her some of the kids down the street had found them and since I was the only one small enough to fit them they let me have them for a dollar. Lying came as easily to me as fighting.
“And where did you get a dollar from?”
“Grandma gave it to me yesterday.”
“Well, I think you spent it well,” Grandma interrupted, peeking over her glasses at my little feet then back at the shoes I held in my hands. “Them old things you wearin’ now are ’bouts ta fall off your feet.”
My mom went back outside to finish emptying the truck before Grandma could start in on her about how dirty I always looked and how she had never let any of her children look that way.
I wore those Adidas, the first brand name sneakers I had ever owned, until my toes busted out the front and beat Sid with a stick when he tried to get them back from me.
— | — | —
Chapter 2
—War, “The World Is A Ghetto”
««—»»
There was a war going on in our neighborhood. Every morning you could smell the burnt carbon and sulfur lingering in the air after a gun battle. It filled your nostrils as you rose to greet the day. No bacon and eggs. No morning paper. Instead you counted the bullet holes in the walls from stray shots to see how close you’d come to not waking up at all and checked your family members to make sure there wasn’t suddenly one less.
In school you could see that wide-eyed shock and nervous fidgeting of post traumatic stress disorder on kids as young as eight and nine who had already lost brothers, cousins, or even parents and grandparents to the war. Some of them were already soldiers themselves. I was insulated from most of it by over-protective parents and living the proper distance from the Avenue. My street was mostly quiet. I was one of only four kids on the block. The rest were all old people. There just wasn’t much gang activity among the geriatric set. But ours was just a small oasis in a desert of violence and crime. Even on the next block there were bodies dropping almost nightly as the hierarchy of criminal power resolved itself through gunfire.
Increased pressure from the government forced the Mafia out of the street-level drug business leaving other organized gangs to fight over the lucrative market which was suddenly wide open. The Jamaican drug posses came blasting through the neighborhood eager to take over the cocaine business, that the Italians had abandoned, from the local thugs, the so-called Junior Black Gangsta Lords. The results were drive-by shootings that left more innocents dead than the intended targets. Including children. Then there was Scratch, a white drug dealer from North Philadelphia who was starting to prop his dealers up in some of the open air drug markets up and down Germantown Avenue. He kept a low profile, but it was pretty well known that he was waiting to mop up after the war between the Jamaicans and the JBGL. He had used the same opportunistic approach in North Philadelphia and now he was the biggest dealer in that part of the city with a crew of nearly a thousand soldiers and dealers. He was the last thing G-town needed.
When the Jamaicans took over the JBGL Scratch started making his presence known more and more and the results were lots of dead Jamaicans. Scratch’s reputation was one of unbelievable violence. The reality of his activities on the street was worse than anything you’d ever heard in even the most brutal gangsta-rap song or over-the-top slasher movie. Scarface didn’t have shit on him. In G-town, he fit right in. Soon, his dealers were shoulder to shoulder with dealers from the JBGL competing for customers on the Ave.
Germantown Avenue separated a dungeonous slum of filth, poverty, and despair on the Eastside from the only slightly more tolerable ghetto on the West. Between the two lay a stretch of concrete wilderness that contained more bars and liquor stores per square inch than any zoning commissioner would allow anywhere but in a slum that was carefully planned to remain that way. Churches, fast food joints, bars, and liquor stores, and in front of each one prowled a drug dealer eager to capitalize off the hopelessness that each venue attracted.
“Oh, Jesus didn’t do it for you today, huh? You don’t want to wait for heaven do ya? You want something that’ll take you there right now? Well, I got just the thing.”
“Hey, big girl! What some fool dumped you so now you’re gonna binge on fried chicken to forget him? All that’s gonna do is make you so fat you’ll never be able to get another man. Here, this’ll help you forget him and lose a few pounds too. Smoke on this for a while and soon you won’t be thinkin’ about that man or that chicken,” a dealer named Yellow Dog hollered as he hung out the passenger side window of a blood-red BMW that looked as if it had been caught in a jewelry store explosion.
Scratch didn’t just hire drug dealers he hired drug
The red BMW cruised slowly up the Ave with Scratch behind the wheel and Yellow Dog leering out the window at the crackwhores prancing and preening for all the dealers and customers alike that glutted the overpopulated street. It looked like some type of festival was going on, “Crack Head Day” or some shit.
“You said you wanted a pregnant one right?” Yellow Dog asked with his eyes still hunting through the parade of drug ravaged flesh.
“Yeah, one that’s just about to pop.” Scratch replied. His eyes radiated more hatred than lust, but Yellow Dog seemed oblivious.
“That’s some sick shit, bro. But I know a lot of guys who like them knocked up whores. They say the pussy’s wetter and their titties are all fat and swollen. I knew a cat who liked to drink milk from them pregnant bitches’ titties. He said it tasted like cream. He got his girl knocked up and tried to drink that bitch dry. After the baby was born he would be nursing right alongside the little rugrat.”
“That’s not what I want the bitch for.” Scratch replied with his blue eyes still spitting icy flame and Yellow Dog fell silent.
“Hey, there’s a pregnant bitch right there but I don’t think she’s a whore though.”
“Is she buyin’ crack?”
“Yeah, I think she is.”
“Then she’s a fuckin’ whore! Go scoop her ass up.”
“Yeah, but I’ve seen that chick walking around with her head all wrapped up. I think she’s a Muslim or some shit.”
Scratch smiled wide so that his gold plated smile caught moonlight and beamed it back.
“Even better. Go get that bitch.”
Yellow Dog wasn’t really down with raping a Muslim woman, but he was even less enamored of the idea of having his head blown off by his murderous employer for disobeying orders. Scratch pulled to the curb and Yellow Dog slipped from the car. He hit the sidewalk right beside the Muslim woman and whispered into her ear.
“Aren’t you with the Nation, sister? What you doin’ up here buyin’ crack?”
Startled, the woman whirled around and found herself staring into the sleepy-eyed leer of the mulatto gangsta who grinned at her like he’d caught her with a dick in her mouth. She looked at him and then quickly dropped her eyes to her feet.
“I-I-I have a problem.” She stammered as she tried to walk around him and avoid his accusatory eyes.
