stuffed it in his pocket.
Huey and Tank fell in behind me with their reappropriated weapons pointed right at Scratch whose mischievous smile had once again abandoned his face. His two bodyguards were behind him, licking their wounds in mute shock.
“That was evil. That was just plain vicious!” The smaller of the two bodyguards said, holding his jaw in place with one hand. Scratch’s smile slowly slithered back onto his face like some alien presence taking over him, but it never reached his eyes. They remained cold slivers of blue ice glaring frostily over the top his Gucci sunglasses.
“Yeah, I likes that. You boys did just fine. I’ma have to have ya’ll come work for me when ya’ll get older. Yeah, I’ma see ya’ll again. Soon.”
His words hung ominously in the air like a curse carved into the mouth of a tomb. We slipped out of the lot. We ran up the street and ducked into an alley on Cherokee and Duval streets behind the old laundromat, which was now a crackhouse and shooting gallery. Moments later we heard two gunshots come from the lot. We stopped and looked at each other, but didn’t say a word. Then Tank and I both noticed that Huey was sobbing. This too brought back the recent memory of Darryl’s murder. He had cried then too.
“Fuck is you cryin’ for, nigga? You actin’ like some kinda bitch!” Tank said as his big dumb smirk twisted into a malicious scowl of disgust.
Huey punched him in the side of his head. Hard. But of course Tank was just barely fazed.
“Fool, if you can take another brotha’s life and not be affected by that shit then you ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ monster. You’re a devil just like that white muthafucka back there! Sometimes we gotta do what we gotta do to come up, but still…don’t nobody deserve to die.”
He stormed off leaving Tank and I standing alone in the piss-smelling alley, shocked and confused.
Huey was one strange brotha sometimes—too deep and too spooky to really relate to. I thought about what he’d said all night and then dismissed it. It made no sense to me. It only depressed and confused me to think about the senselessness of some brothas dying just so other brothas could enjoy a fleeting moment of success. Niggas lived. Niggas died. And if I didn’t pull the trigger it was just a matter of time before someone else did or they dropped the hammer on someone else themselves. Why cry over what you couldn’t change?
Still, Huey had made me question myself and think about the little boy whose life I’d stolen, his parents grief, and how his life may have turned out had I not abbreviated it. I fought down the tears not wanting to admit that Huey might’ve been right.
Later that night we heard on the news that three bodies were found in the lot; two seventeen year-old boys, one with a broken jaw and dislocated knee, the other with a bullet hole through his left thigh and a broken nose. They both had three clean nine millimeter bullet holes through the back of their heads. One had three entrance wounds but only two exit wounds. One in the roof of his mouth and the other in his lower jaw. Three front teeth and the tip of his tongue had been sheared off. The other one had acquired a third eye and been reduced to one nostril. The last bullet had gone through the very top of his head and down his throat.
Scratch had retired his two leg-breakers with three clean shots each for getting their asses kicked by ninth graders. Unknowingly, we had taken three lives.
What the newscaster didn’t say, but I knew, was that all three of them had their brains sucked out of the holes in their skulls. They didn’t need to report it on TV for the news to make its way around the neighborhood. Things like that had a way of getting out no matter how hard the police tried to suppress it.
The newscaster wrote the incident off as “…
We entered the 8th grade with brand new wardrobes in all the latest fashions and at least two pairs of sneakers each. Our new gear established us in school as bonafide playas.
Our new status was a drastic change from what we had previously known and we weren’t at all willing to go back to the dirty little street thugs that everyone made fun of. Right then and there we decided that we had to stay suited up properly no matter what we had to do or to whom we had to do it. When our mother’s asked us where we had gotten all the clothes we told them that we had a friend who worked at a clothing store and they had stolen them for us. Our parents scolded us half-heartedly for stealing, but were secretly relieved not to have to buy us back-to-school clothes. In the ghetto the gift horse was so rare that when it came you didn’t just look it in the mouth you cut it open and gutted it out.
We never talked about how we had really gotten the new gear, not even to each other, and we tried to pretend that we really had stolen them rather than paid for them with money soaked in blood. Black blood. We had all become killers that year and our lives were irrevocably altered.
— | — | —
Chapter 8
—Jay-Z, “Marcy”
««—»»
In the ghetto, as in the world, clothes make the man. The policeman’s uniform, the prostitute’s latex mini- skirt, the pimp’s gator shoes, the gangsta’s low slung jeans sagging off his ass. They all give clues to the nature of the individual beneath. Books are judged by their covers here and we strolled through the halls of our little Jr. High School covered in FUBU, Adidas, Nike, and Gucci. Fights were no longer started by insults from others about our outdated clothing. We were stylin’ now. The girls treated us differently now too. They actually asked us over to their houses and out to the movies rather than just laughing in our faces when we tried to ask them. The clothes made all the difference.
We acted differently too. In a society where the standard of excellence is wealth, poverty can tax your self- esteem and your entire sense of self-worth. Likewise, a dose of affluence can boost your confidence tremendously. My grades, which had been slowly slipping down into the toilet, made a dramatic recovery. I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand in class and ask questions when I didn’t understand something. I didn’t mind calling attention to myself anymore. Not when I was wearing two hundred dollars worth of designer labels on my back.
Mrs. Greenblade, who credited herself for my transformation from class clown to honor student, began to take a special interest in me. She convinced me to work on the school newspaper writing editorials on school politics and an occasional book or movie review. I loved writing and so I started reading the paper everyday and took elaborate pains to make all the articles I wrote sound professional, just like the ones in the
Mrs. Greenblade even tried to convince me to give up my lunch period to attend her journalism class, but I had to pass on that. Since I was already staying an hour after school to work on the paper I figured she could teach me all I needed to know about journalism then. Lunchtime was when me and my boys jacked fools for their cash. I couldn’t give that up.
At the teacher’s suggestion I began to keep notes of my daily thoughts and experiences. A lot of what I’m sayin’ here today comes out of those notes. It’s hard to recall how much of it really happened and how much of it is just bullshit. Being a writer it’s always difficult to refrain from embellishment and the whole story is just so difficult to believe. Still, it’s as honest a telling as I can manage.
When I reached the eighth grade, Mrs. Greenblade recommended me for the mentally gifted program after I passed the level fourteen English test; the equivalent of college freshman English. Unfortunately, my math scores were about two grades below the level they should have been for my age and they rejected me with a recommendation that I get some tutoring to improve my math skills.
