Monster

Frustration rose up like an evil serpent from a murky river, snatched me, and drew me under. It was then that I began to realize the impact of my being wounded and all the mental strain that I had actually been under.

I lay prone for what seemed like a day or two, trying to piece together what had taken place in my life over the past five years. Damn, had it actually been five years? Yes, five years had elapsed since my joining up with the set. Although it seemed like a long time, it had gone very quickly. At the same time, the seriousness of my chosen path had made me age with double rapidity. At sixteen I felt twenty-four. Life meant very little to me. I felt that my purpose on earth was to bang. My mind-set was narrowed by the conditions and circumstances prevailing around me. Certainly I had little respect for life when practically all my life I had seen people assaulted, maimed, and blown away at very young ages, and no one seemed to care. I recognized early that where I lived, we grew and died in dog years. Actually, some dogs outlived us. Where I lived, stepping on someone’s shoe was a capital offense punishable by death. This was not just in a few isolated instances, or as a result of one or two hotheads, but a recognized given for the crime of disrespect. Regardless of the condition of the shoes, the underlying factor that usually got you killed was the principle. The principle is respect, a linchpin critical to relations between all people, but magnified by thirty in the ghettos and slums across America.

I had no idea of peace and tranquility. From my earliest recollections there has been struggle, strife, and the ubiquity of violence. This ranged from the economic destitution of my family to the domestic violence between my parents, from the raging gang wars to the omnipresent occupational police force in hot pursuit. Peace to me was a fleeting illusion only to be seen on TV programs like “The Brady Bunch.” I’ve never been at peace, and nothing has ever been stable. Everything in my life has been subject to drastic change or subtle movement, without so much as a hint or forewarning. I’ve always felt like a temporary guest everywhere I’ve been, all of my life, and, truly, I’ve never been comfortable. Motion has been my closest companion, from room to room, house to house, street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood, school to school, jail to jail, cell to cell—from one man-made hell to another. So I didn’t care one way or another about living or dying—and I cared less than that about killing someone.

The set was my clearest vision of stability. Although changes took place in the hood, the hood itself never changed. To ensure that it didn’t, we vowed to kill all who set out to eliminate it. This obsession has been evidenced by our carriage in warfare. The ultimate stability, however, was death—the final rest, the only lasting peace. Though never verbally stated, death was looked upon as a sort of reward, a badge of honor, especially if one died in some heroic capacity for the hood. The supreme sacrifice was to “take a bullet for a homie.” The set functioned as a religion. Nothing held a light to the power of the set. If you died on the trigger you surely were smiled upon by the Crip God. On my homie Lucky’s tombstone it simply says: “My baby Brother taking a rest.” He was fourteen when he was murdered, but he had lived so hard through so much that he needed a rest. We all learned quite early through experience that it was sometimes better to rest in peace than to continue to live in war.

In Vietnam when a soldier was wounded badly enough he was sent home. Home was a place where there was peace. No real danger of the ’Cong existed stateside. The war was ten thousand miles away. In contrast, our war is where we live. Where do we go when we’ve been wounded bad, or when our minds have been reduced to mincemeat by years, not months, of constant combat? If Vietnam vets suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, then I contend that gang members who are combat soldiers are subject to the same mind-bend as are veterans of foreign wars.

For us there is no retreat to a place ten thousand miles away, where one can receive psychiatric attention with full benefits from the Veterans Administration. No, our problems are left to compound, and our traumatic stress thickens, as does our abnormal behavior caused by the original malady gone unchecked. Is there any wonder our condition continues to worsen?

Talking with any gang member one will quickly pick up on the high praise and respect given when, in the course of conversation, a dead homie is mentioned. Usually before or right after the name of the deceased is spoken, “rest in peace” will be communicated in a very respectful tone.

Being wounded, on the other hand, can be taken two ways. In some cases, cats who’ve been wounded simply drop out of sight and use their injuries as an excuse to say “enough,” which, of course, still leaves the set in the position of having to respond to the attack. All strikes against the set have to be answered in a timely and appropriate manner; otherwise the set’s prestige wanes and eventually it collapses under the weight of the ridicule and military hegemony. But sometimes the wounded party utilizes their affliction to reaffirm their commitment to the ’hood. In so doing, they automatically climb another notch up the ladder toward that desired status of O.G.

Li’l Crazy De, for instance, has been shot thirteen separate times and is still committed to the ’hood. In the tenth unsuccessful attempt on his life he lost his left eye and a piece of his scalp. He is loved by few, hated by many, but respected by all. His legend is like that of the notorious gangster Legs Diamond, who had been shot repeatedly and survived. My wounding, however, fell deep within this second category, though there really was no need to reaffirm my commitment, for it went without saying that I’d be back. But the Sixties were certain that I had died. In fact, their premature celebration is what drew the set’s attention to them as the possible shooters. We were at war with so many sets that it was hard to pin my shooting on any one ’hood, so the homies responded by hitting every ’hood we didn’t get along with and a few that we did, just to be sure. The violence level rose dramatically in the days following my shooting—so much, in fact, that two officers from CRASH had come to the hospital with pleas for me to somehow stop it. When I’d gestured helplessly with my palms turned up they’d resorted to threats of conspiracy and accessory charges. I couldn’t possibly help them.

When I finally reached my call button, I was surprised to find that I was being attended by an Afrikan nurse. She hurried about the room, checking on my general state, and then informed me that I was to be moved to yet another room, on the ninth floor. She was very talkative and witty, perhaps in her mid-to late thirties, and buxom. I pegged her as a stalwart Christian who was a third-generation immigrant from the National Territory (that is, the rest of the United States). She was very dark and very shiny and her name was Eloise. When she spoke she lit up the room with a radiant smile generated by sparkling white teeth.

“Now what happened to you?” she asked, hands planted on both sides of her shapely hips.

“I’m in pain,” I responded. “Can you give me a shot?”

“Fo’ what, so you can turn into a junkie?” she shot back.

“No, so I can stop hurtin.”

“Baby, you been gettin’ twenty-eight grams of morphine every four hours for three days now. I think it’s time you slowed down.”

“What? Three days! What is the date today?”

“Today is,” she said, looking at the watch on her fat wrist, “January third, nineteen eighty-one.”

I had no sense of time and just couldn’t believe that three days had elapsed since I had been shot.

“Now, what happened to you?” she asked again.

“I was shot.”

“Shit, boy, I can see that. But what happened?” She asked in a voice of genuine concern, so I felt compelled to tell her.

“Gangbangin’. I was shot by other gang members.” This sounded awkward to me, trying to explain it to her.

“And who shot you?”

Damn, I thought, was she some kind of detective or what, asking me all those questions.

“Don’t know, maybe some Sixties, but I really don’t know.”

“And where you from, the Eighties?” she asked, but somehow she already knew.

“Yep, how you know?” Now I was getting very uncomfortable.

“I know ’bout that war y’all got going on over there. My son is involved in that shit,” she said with disgust.

“Who is your son and where is he from?”

“Now don’t you worry about that.”

“Is he from my set, one of my homies?” I asked anxiously.

“I ain’t got nothin’ to say ’bout it no mo’. It’s a damn shame how y’all do each other over some concrete no one owns.”

Oh shit, I thought, here comes one of those sermons about how we are fighting for nothing and that we are all black people. Save it, lady. But she didn’t say anything else, so I asked her why I was being moved. Because it