pressed the gun deeper into his eye and gritted my teeth, imagining the loud report of the huge weapon.
“It would be a damned shame if you was lyin’.” My eyes had gone vacant and glassy with the bloodlust. I was trying to muster up the courage to eat this kid’s brains the way I had seen that white gangster do when I first moved into this neighborhood. If a white boy could do it then I damned sure could too. Fuck if I was going to chew his balls off though. That was just takin’ it too far.
“Meech!!!”
An alien voice rang out behind us and I almost turned and shot at it, but I knew that Demetrious would have taken that opportunity to run and if I had to shoot him I didn’t want it to be in the back. That would have ruined his jacket and I still wanted it.
I turned my head and was surprised to see a white boy walking across the field with two hyper-muscular thugs on either side of him like massive black bookends. The white dude was wearing a FUBU shirt with pictures of Fat Albert and the gang on it. Two big platinum chains draped down over his emaciated chest one ending in a crucifix and the other with a diamond encrusted medallion shaped like the continent of Africa. On him both symbols were a mockery. He wore big clunky Timberland work boots despite the heat and lack of snow and a black “North Philly” baseball cap spun backwards on his blonde head. A pair of jet back “Loce” style sunglasses with the Gucci label on the arm completely hid his eyes, but I had seen them before, first furious and then enraptured as he had consumed that Rasta’s gray matter years ago. I hadn’t thought about that shit in a long time. After a while I had managed to convince myself that it had all been in my head. But seeing that white boy walking toward me across the field brought it all back to me. There standing across from me was the devil himself.
He had a platinum three-finger ring with the name “Scratch” spelled out in a cluster of diamonds. His mouth sparkled with platinum capped teeth with rubies embedded in the canines that gleamed in the failing twilight. The white boy’s sunglasses slipped down the bridge of his nose as he peered down at us and his cold blue eyes narrowed into slits. The whites of his eyes had sallowed from excessive marijuana use.
Back then I didn’t really know any white people. None of the kids I hung out with knew any either. We went to school with them, but we never spoke to them and they never spoke to us either and never ever came into our neighborhood. They were like mysterious specters existing just on the periphery of our experience. Influencing our lives in frightning and dramatic ways that we could scarcely imagine, but never seeming to come into direct contact with us. The man who shut off your heat and your telephone when you couldn’t afford to pay the bill that month was white. The man who tacked the eviction notice up on your door when the rent was late was white. The man who came to arrest your father and take him away to prison forever was white. In our minds, white people were right up there with God and the devil. They were spoken of in whispers and curses and appeared in gross proportions in every aspect of mass media from the pictures on our candy wrappers to the televisions, movies, magazines, and billboards we saw every day. They passed us in department stores and gave us strange looks that made us feel guilty and unclean, somehow less than a person
There was no doubting who he was. Even if I hadn’t seen him blast and then cannibalize that rasta on my doorstep a few years back, everyone had heard of Scratch by that time. Seeing a white boy living down in the ghetto slangin’ cane and shooting up the ’hood made news. By the time Huey, Tank, and I had gotten tight, Scratch had tightened his grip on the whole neighborhood and bizarrely had become both enemy and idol. He had “Gangsta” emblazoned across his soul right next to the neon sign that flashed “Murderer” in searing crimson. Since the day I’d seen him off one of Jah Warrior’s boys outside my window he’d grown into one of the biggest crack dealers in North Philadelphia. Still, I decided to front like I didn’t know him just to play hard. I was hoping he wouldn’t notice my legs shaking in my baggy jeans. I was scared shitless.
“Who the fuck is you?” I asked, still jamming the barrel of the gun into Meech’s eyesocket.
Scratch’s two bodyguard’s, dressed similarly in FUBU running suits and big clunky Timberland boots were already drawing their guns. Every dealer who was clockin’ major chips back then had bodyguards. His were megalomorphic giants both over six feet tall and close to 300lbs. They were teenagers as well, highschool athletes. The largest of them I recognized as a lineman on G-town High’s football team.
“That little mutherfucker owes me some chedda…” Scratch slurred, still glaring hard over the top of his Gucci sunglasses. Then he turned those cold slivers of ice toward Meech, “…and some pain.”
Demetrious shuddered visibly.
“I don’t give a fuck! We got business with him ourselves and since we got to him first you gonna have to wait your turn whoever your Vanilla Ice lookin’ ass is supposed to be.” I looked him up and down sneering contemptuously.
“You ever here of Scratch, little bro?” He asked calmly pointing to the name on his ring. “Well that’s who the fuck I am, my nizzle! So if you know what time it is you’ll act like you know and turn this fool over to me. You know I’m sayin’?”
His slang was thicker than the most ignorant thugs I knew, but it was obviously exaggerated. The dialect of someone reared on gangsta rap.
As if subtlety could exist in such titanic forms, his two bodyguards crept closer inch by inch trying to quietly position themselves for an ambush, plotting to jump me for the gun and smoke us all. But I wasn’t about to go out like that. I had lived with death all my life. I could sense its every movement and very nearly read its thoughts. It swirled around Scratch transposed over his image like a double exposure. The taint of it had already marked his bodyguards. I wondered then if it had perhaps marked us as well.
I nodded to Huey and he slipped around to the side of the bodyguard nearest him ready to intercept should they try some dumb shit. With Huey and his brother at my side I was feeling damned brave even though the two linebackers were both even larger than Tank, and Huey was smaller than all of us. However, what Huey lacked in size he more than made up for in skill. He was lethal with that martial arts shit.
“Alright, if you Scratch then what tha fuck do a big time hustler want with some little pussy-ass nigga like this? And what the fuck is you doin’ up here in the G? I thought ya’ll kicked it down in North Town?”
“This little bitch vic’ed some of my stash and my money. That’s why I’m here.”
Scratch smiled wide so that the sun sparkled on his bejeweled orthodontic work at which point his two bodyguards lunged clumsily for me. I had been anticipating the attack and squeezed off a shot, catching one of them high on the thigh and missing his family jewels by mere inches. Huey took the other one’s kneecap off with a roundhouse kick. His shin impacted the huge teenager’s patella with a sickening “Crunch!” that bent his leg backwards against the grain and sent him tumbling earthward with an ear-piercing shriek. Huey scowled viciously and then kicked the knee again eliciting a fresh howl of agony then he drew his foot back as far as he could and aimed a kick at the boy’s jaw. The jaw made a hollow popping sound as it came unhinged and hung stupidly from the fractured tendons. The big boy’s eyes rolled up in his head. He was unconscious before his head finished its decent to the steaming dirt floor.
The bodyguard I’d shot was reeling on the floor cursing and groaning in pain and rage. The recoil from the huge gun had nearly torn it from my grasp. My heart was trip-hammering in my chest and my blood raced with exhiliration. I nearly swooned with the rush of adrenalin that hit me as I pulled the trigger. It was nearly as strong as the recoil from the gun and I stood there trembling; visibly shaken by it as the big black leg breaker prepared to aim a shot at my head.
“Muthafucka! You shot me! You little bastard muthafucker! I’ma kill your punk ass!”
“Fool, you ain’t killin’ shit.”
He was too slow and Huey was on the case, silencing him with a kick to the bridge of the nose that shattered the delicate cartiledge and smeared his nose across his face in a bloody spray before he could properly aim. The shot sailed about two feet over my head and ricocheted off a building somewhere off in the distance. Huey collected both the guns from the two fallen killers. Half the size of Scratch’s tremendous bodyguards, Huey’s psychotic ferocity and martial arts knowledge had made him twice their match. They hadn’t stood a chance.
“What was you gonna try and smoke all of us over this muthafucka?”
Scratch shrugged his shoulders as if to say: “You can’t blame a muthafucker for tryin’,” and kept staring from me to Demetrious to the two defeated leg-breakers and then to Huey who leveled his eyes, blistering with an inexplicable hatred, at him as if they were lasers that could burn him to a cinder. I looked down at the two guns in his hands and hoped that he wouldn’t shoot. Huey hated white people as if each and every member of the race had done him some grave and personal injustice. A white boy who had just tried to kill him was almost guaranteed a trip to the grave. But we both knew better than to off a guy like Scratch.
“Okay, so now what?” Scratch asked. He tucked his sunglasses back over his eyes to hide his expression and
