“Aaaaah! My eyes! The bitch maced me!”
I heard shuffling and cursing and what sounded like blows being thrown. The girl never screamed once as Huey and Tank beat the shit out of her and her boyfriend.
I still couldn’t see as we ran down the street. Huey and Tank were holding my arms and guiding me along as we ran. I could hear doors opening in the houses as we passed. Whenever I tried to open my eyes pain washed over me. My own tears burned my skin as they dripped down my cheeks. My lungs were clogged with the stuff and I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was about to pass out. There was no way I could keep running. I coughed and sneezed and finally I stopped running.
“Come on, man. We got to go!” Tank yelled.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” My mounting panic was making things worse. It felt like I was trying to inhale flames. My nostrils, throat, and even my lungs burned.
“Shit! We can’t leave you here.”
“Damn straight you can’t!”
“Shit. Shit. Shit. Tank! Can you carry him?”
“For about a block. Maybe two.”
“Well, fuck it. Carry him as far as you can.”
Tank slung me over his shoulder and we ran again. I thought I was going to throw up. After another minute or so my eyesight came back blurry and unfocused and still burning like I was looking into a blast furnace. What I saw wasn’t good.
Three cop cars were speeding up the street toward us. Tank stopped and looked at Huey questioningly. Huey snatched our guns out of our wastebands and ran toward an alley across the street. Huey came back out of the alley just as Tank and I were being thrown across the hood of a police cruiser and cracked across the hamstrings and back of the knees with Billy clubs. If he had just kept walking he probably could have gotten away. Huey didn’t look at all like a thug.
“You with these guys?”
“Yeah.”
“Then your ass is going to jail too.”
“You got any weapons on you?”
“No.”
“Do you know what you’re being arrested for?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any drugs on you?”
“No.”
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen?”
“How old?”
“Fourteen?”
“You’re a bit big for fourteen ain’t you? You play basketball?”
“Don’t all niggas?”
“Well, then you should have kept your black ass on the court instead of fucking around in the street robbing people. Now come on niggers and get your asses in the car! You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney…”
I spent the night in jail. My mom refused to come and get me. I spent eight months in Youth Study Center, Philadelphia’s juvenile detention ward, before the trial. I was sentenced to another six months in Youth Study Center plus time served. After that the three of us were sent to Daniel Boone, probably the worst reform school in Philadelphia. Some of Scratch’s boys were there at the same time we were. We joined up with his little gang just to make things easier. Reform schools are as bad or worse than penitentiaries. Kids were beaten, killed, and raped everyday by other kids and guards alike. Every morning I woke up to the smell of burning flesh. Setting fire to someone’s bed was Boone’s favorite way of eliminating an enemy. There were many kids walking around with severe burn scars to match the scars from shanks and shivs. Joining up with Scratch was the safest way to ensure that we would live through the night. Once we were back on the street our relationship with Scratch continued profitably.
“I heard you three little thugs was holdin’ it down for me over at Boone. You in now. You want to stay in then come with me. I got plenty of work if you want it. Ya’ll down?”
He smiled and his gold-plated grille gleamed like the fiery gates of hell. He wanted me to come work for the devil. I thought about all the money we’d made for smokin’ Demetrious’ bitch ass and how nice it was to have all those cool clothes and shit. Fuck it.
“Yeah, we down.”
A chill raced up my spine like a ghost had just crossed my path. I ignored it.
“What do we got to do?”
— | — | —
Chapter 9
“
—Mark Twain, “The White Man’s Notion”
««—»»
Scratch had been around so long that he was as much a part of the Black community as the soul food restaurants, rib joints, swap-meets, and storefront churches. He was as familiar a fixture as the Black Muslims selling bean-pies and Final Call newspapers on Chelten Ave and the junkies, crackheads, and winos chasing the next high up and down Germantown Ave. Like all of us, he was brought here by hard-luck and misfortune and had found a way to overcome it. And, like many of us, he had overcome it at the expense of the rest of the community. He was as much of a curse to black people as poverty, drugs, and AIDS.
I was still in diapers when he and his dad moved to Philly. His father, Stephen Hechtman, was a riches to rags case. Word is that he was a financial advisor on Wall Street when his wife caught him fucking around with this Black call-girl named Nikky who looked like a young Pam Grier, long legs, afro, big tits, coffee complexion and all. Seems he had a thing for the sistas.
Now, I don’t know the whole story, just rumors and shit and what Scratch told me himself whenever he was drunk and in a confessional mood. I’m not sure which version is more reliable. Scratch always had a talent for bullshit. But this is how I think it all happened, how Scratch became Scratch.
His mom caught his dad in their house, in their bed, with his face buried in this black bitch’s ass. She forgave him and they started going to counseling but then she caught his ass again. He’d been calling out sick from work to spend the day smoking crack and fucking that whore in her ass in a loft he’d rented for her in the village. The little trick had fallen in love. He was burning through their savings like it was a fucking holiday, buying his little whore all the drugs, clothes, and jewelry she could want. His wife divorced him while there was still something left for her to get half of. He lost his job soon after that and then he moved to Philly with his whore and his young son. He was now hopelessly addicted to rock cocaine.
He moved them into an apartment in Society Hill and him and his Nubian princess would spend all day and all night partying like rock stars, smoking rocks and fucking like fiends. That only lasted a couple of months before he’d smoked up the last of his savings and they all wound up in the projects. That’s where Stephen Jr. died and Scratch was born,
For Stephen Jr. being the only White kid in the projects meant frequent ass-kickings and long hours of loneliness. He was deathly afraid of the teeming swarms of hostile dark-skinned kids that he suddenly found himself surrounded by. For them, he represented the establishment that had long victimized them. He was their chance to get back at the White man and they took that chance at every opportunity, sending young Stephen home with missing teeth, bloody noses, and fat lips, almost every day. Stephen would sit in his room crying while Stephen Sr. and his Black whore got high in the next room. He would remember the Manhatten apartment he’d grown up in, the
