couch. He was all out of proportion. Short, with a huge stomach, plump stubby legs, arms that hung with cellulite like an old woman’s, and big saggy man-breasts. He had cause to be defensive. Me, Tank, Warlock, and the twins, rose up and stood behind Greg, anticipating a fight.
“Fuck that tip shit, nigga! Ya’ll muthafuckas wouldn’t even give me that free soda ya’ll advertised—talking about I had to order over twenty dollars worth of shit and this is only $17.50. Now you tryin’ to vic my change! You must be sick, fool!”
“Give that nigga his change before you get your ass fucked up.” Warlock growled. He was twenty years old by then, anorexicly skinny, and five inches shy of six feet. The delivery boy on the other hand was probably closer to twenty-five, well over six feet and swollen up like a heavyweight boxer. But one look at Warlock’s gold and you knew the man was a player. The pizza man looked Warlock up and down searching for a weapon then decided that he didn’t want to take any chances with a porchful of niggas in a strange neighborhood. For all he knew we could have been a gang or something with a house full of artillery.
“Man, here’s your damned two-fifty! You cheap-ass muthafucka! A brotha can’t even make a damned livin’!”
“Not off my money you can’t, muthafucka!”
“Ya’ll shut tha fuck up! The damned movie’s on!”
“Fuck you! Yella ass nigga!” Warlock joked, but he sat down to watch the film.
We started dividing up the pizza and in no time at all the box was nearly empty.
“Damn, niggas! I paid for the shit and all I get is one slice?”
Tank was standing there with the box in his hand, one slice still left inside, chomping down on another slice held in his huge meaty paw.
“Here, fool! Stop crying and take another slice!”
“Two whole slices? Thanks.” Greg frowned.
“Ay, if you don’t want it I’ll eat the muthufucka.”
“Fuck that shit!”
“Well all right then. Shut da fuck up and eat.”
The credits rolled and all conversation died to a whisper. It was a Run Run Shaw classic,
“See this big muthafucka right here? His name is Toad and he does this iron shirt technique that makes him impervious to weapons. Spears and swords just bounce right off of him. That’s a bad motherfucka right there.”
“I bet a bullet would stop his ass.” Little Drew offered trying to sound hard. Everyone just ignored him and kept watching the flick. We all knew that Drew’s momma would kick his ass if she ever found him with a gun. Bitch ass nigga couldn’t even leave the block without telling his mom first.
“See how in these Chinese movies when someone’s fighting a group of people they’re always moving, the camera angles keep changing, the people he’s fighting move in and out of camera range and everything is happening real fast so it don’t look like they’re just standing around waiting to get hit like in them fake-ass Van Damme flicks. Americans don’t know shit about making Kung Fu movies. This here is the real shit!”
We watched two other films and then we decided to play football. It was about six o’clock in the evening and it had finally cooled down. Besides that, Drew’s mom made him bring the VCR back in the house.
Darlene and Trina Livingston, two huge manly Jamaican girls who looked like female bodybuilders, had come out to play football with us. Darlene was the oldest. She was sixteen years old, had legs like Arnold Swartzenegger, and breasts like Pam Grier. She was the only one among us big enough to tackle Tank. Her younger sister Trina was just slightly smaller at 5’10” but no less intimidating. They were the best football players in the neighborhood. They could run, throw, catch, and hit like Mack trucks.
We chose up sides and I got Darlene, fat Greg, and both twins. Huey got Trina, Tank, Warlock, and Nikky. Terrance had finally come back to reality, but was still in no condition to play so he just sat on the porch and talked shit about everyone. We made him a referee.
We called the game 1-2-3 hold, but when it came down to it, it was straight up tackle. We played right in the middle of the street on concrete and asphalt. Slamming each other down hard on the steaming black top. Cars hardly ever came down our block and when they did we played right around them.
Huey’s team had the edge in speed, but we had brute strength on our side. Seeing Darlene and Tank go at it was truly awesome. They weren’t pulling any punches, at least Darlene wasn’t, and it looked like they were going to kill each other, slamming into one another full force without helmets or pads. I was the only one who knew that Tank had a crush on her and that he was in heaven feeling her rock hard body slamming into him.
At first our team steamrolled Huey’s. We slammed them into parked cars, denting not a few of them, slung them to the concrete like bundles of garbage, and wound up sending Warlock’s little ass home with a sprained ankle and bloody knees.
Huey bobbed and weaved like Deon Sanders and nobody could catch him. In the end their speed proved too much for us. They beat us 42 to 35. I knew that we had only gotten that far because Tank was holding back when it came time to tackle Darlene. She on the other hand was trying to knock the stuffing out of him. It was funny to see his big, black, love-struck ass bouncing off the concrete over and over again still grinning at her like an idiot as she ran right over him. That was one of the best days of my life and the last day of my childhood. It was soon after that that our lives changed for good.
— | — | —
Chapter 7
—Al Capone
—Cypress Hill, “How I Can Just Kill A Man”
««—»»
There was a fierce heatwave scorching the life out of Philadelphia on the day I first met Scratch. The summer seemed like it would never end. The sun perched on our backs and rode us hard from six A.M. until damn near nine o’clock every night. The heat and humidity had coated the city like a sheet of hot oil. I think the temperature was ninety-eight degrees, but the humidity made it feel like a hundred and ten. The scorching temperatures were igniting fuses. The whole neighborhood was going ballistic. Folks were dying from knife and bullet wounds as much as from heat stroke. School was out. Violent crime was up. And everyone around my way was either trying to stay cool or trying to get paid. Both of which were nearly impossible in that boiling cauldron of madness and poverty that we called G-town.
Wasn’t much of anything going down in the G that day. Water gun fights, crack pipes flickering in the dark alleys that provided the only shade on our treeless little street. Those who had someone to fuck were sweating in their lover’s embrace propagating the next generation of the poor, hopeless, and pissed-da-fuck-off. Hip-hop music boomed from every radio, the bass thundering like the ghetto’s heartbeat, a testosterone thunder-drum pounding out the rhythm and song of Black rage and rebellion.
The basketball courts were filled with future Julius Ervings, Magic Johnsons, and Micheal Jordans, sweating half the fluids in their bodies out on the hard concrete courts as they leapt toward the hoops. Every fire hydrant was pouring out hundreds of gallons of water onto the scarred and filthy streets as equally scarred and filthy kids laughed and played in its cool spray. Me and my boys, Tank and Huey, were sitting around pitying ourselves and trying to think of someone to make suffer for what we wanted, didn’t have, and could see no way of ever possibly affording, when a deer walked right into the middle of our pack and bared its throat to the wolves.
This kid’s name was Demetrious, “Meech” for his friends. He had just moved into the neighborhood from the
