“Well, then let me help you, sista.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I know that it wouldn’t do for anyone else to see you up here on the Ave. Why don’t you hop in my ride and let me get you out of here. Then I’ll get you fixed up proper.” Yellow Dog opened his hand to reveal the four vials of crack rolling around in his palm and her eyes were instantly drawn to them. She didn’t hear a word he said after that. Nothing else mattered. She would have followed him anywhere for the promise of the pipe. Her addiction was strong. Obviously Allah had not been enough to tame it.
Yellow Dog walked with her to the Beemer and opened the passenger door with a flourish. When she looked in and saw Scratch behind the wheel she turned to Yellow Dog with rage and disgust twisting her face into a vicious snarl.
“You didn’t say anything about riding with no devils!”
“All White people aren’t devils, young lady…” Scratch pulled his big shiny nickel plated .45 and pointed it right at the woman’s belly. His eyes gleamed with a feral lust that ignited the icy irises like lanterns. “…Just me. Now get the fuck in this car and let me show you some of this here tricknology.”
He grinned wider as Yellow Dog covered her mouth to prevent her from screaming and shoved her into the car.
“Allow me to introduce myself, sista. My name is Scratch and I’m the trickster your minister warned you about.”
— | — | —
Chapter 3
—Samuel Butler
««—»»
After living in that neighborhood for several months and mostly playing by myself I somehow managed to make friends with a few kids. Nikky and his big brother Warlock were my first real road dogs in the neighborhood. Warlock was a sixteen year-old drug dealer, graffiti artist, and wannabe pimp. He wore Cross Colors sweat suits, and gold chains so thick they looked like slave restraints. His hair was cut into a gravity-defying block taper that stuck up more than a foot from his head.
Warlock was a lethal looking street snake with eyes that were perpetually narrowed in suspicion and yellowed from blunt smoke. He was skinny as a rail and knee-high to a sewer rat, but he was known to be quick as death with a switchblade. With a knife in his hand Warlock would take on men twice his size. He was like a magician whose stainless steel prestidigitation could leave a brother cut from his ass crack to his nut sack in the silence between heartbeats. Warlock had much respect around the way. His brother Nikky was comparatively square.
Nikky was a shy kid who spent all his time drawing, daydreaming, reading comic books, and writing graffiti. Still, he got respect for his lyrical skills. Nikky was an aspiring hip-hop artist who could spin rhymes off the top of his head without missing a beat even though he often stuttered just trying to say hello.
He never wrote any of his rhymes down, but I suspected that during the long minutes he spent daydreaming he was really composing the complex lyrics that were his trademark. He could hold an entire crowd of teenagers enthralled as he stood on the corner spittin’ his gift like a ghetto griot, telling the stories of our lives.
Nikky was thicker than his brother and average height for an eight year-old. His hair was cut conservatively short with rippling waves and tapered on the sides. Both he and his brother were the color of polished oak but where Nikky’s skin was smooth and unblemished, Warlock’s face was a minefield of scars and pock marks and his teeth were covered with braces that looked like a mouthful of barbed wire. Somehow Warlock managed to make that metallic grin look cool. I even asked my mother if I could get braces just to look like him. Unfortunately my teeth were completely straight.
The day I first met the two brothers they were propped up against Warlock’s powder blue 1988 Lincoln Continental blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” as loud as his over-priced stereo system could crank and arguing with another kid Warlock’s age about who could rap better him or Nikky. Warlock was pimpin’ a pair of baggy Turkish pants in that MC Hammer style and an oversized polka dot dress shirt. He wore a furry red Kangol cap on his head and snake skin Stacey Adams. Nikky was dressed more conservatively in a pair of baggy Jive pants that hung low on his hips so that his red and white polka dot Calvin Klein boxers were visible and a T-shirt his brother had airbrushed in wild style graffiti letters that spelled out G-town. I stared at their clothing practically drooling with envy. If it wasn’t for the fact that Nikky looked so self-conscious and uncomfortable in his clothes I would have hated him instantly. I hated anyone rich and anyone coming on my block wearing a pair of $60 Jive jeans while I wore my $19.99 J.C. Penny’s Tough Skins would have been a hated enemy. But there was something about this kid. Even Warlock still looked like a street kid who’d found his fairy godmother and had been blessed for a time with princely garb. There was a fear in his eyes, just below the surface, that all of this wouldn’t last. That tomorrow the car, the stereo, the clothes might all be gone and he’d be right back in the projects choking on filth.
The kid that stood between them was an obvious hanger on. One of those who believed coolness could be passed through osmosis. He wore a greasy do-rag beneath which his naps were baking in an S-curl pomade. His fake Gucci sweatshirt was stained with the stuff. His name was Devin but he preferred to be called “Divinity”. When I walked up they had just started to battle.
“Well, who’s gonna judge this thing? It can’t be you. You’re his brother. Of course you’re gonna say he won.”
Warlock looked around and spotted me kicking a rock across the street looking bored and pretending not to be listening to their conversation.
“Yo! Kid! Come here for a sec!”
I walked over, fighting to keep the grin off my face.
“What’s up, dog?”
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Malik.”
“Well, my name is Warlock. This is my brother Nikky, and this fool here is Devin.”
“Divinity,” he interrupted offering his hand, which I shook without taking my eyes off Warlock.
“Whatever. Anyway, we’re about to have a little battle right here and we want you to be our unbiased judge.”
“I really don’t know that much about rap.”
“You know what you like and what you don’t. That’s good enough.”
“Alright, Devin, you go first.”
“Ay little homie. Can you do a beat box?”
“A what?”
“Nigga stop stallin’ and start flowin’!” Warlock growled.
Warlock started off with some old school tongue twister shit that sounded like a rip-off of Kangol from U.T.F.O. mixed with 2 Live Crew.
“Well, I’m Divinity—In the place to be—I put the girls in ecstasy—every time they see me—rip the microphone like a pair of lace panties—make the girlies scream like I’m all up in their pussy…”
His rap went on and on with that typical B-boy macho misogynistic bravado. Some of it was pretty funny, but none of it was very good. Then Nikky began to flow and what was coming out of his mouth was like nothing I’d ever heard. He was kicking straight poetry.
“Look long and hard—see the heavens scarred—by the impotent tears of a race torn apart— by a prejudice world and our misguided rage—attacking the puppets on a cardboard stage—Now we’re stuck in the gloom of our ghetto tomb—and even love to us is just the herald of doom—Who can I trust in this world of fear? What is beauty to the eyes that shed no tears?”
“Yeah, muthafucka! That’s what I’m talkin’ about, nigga!”
