exclusive private school, and his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since the divorce. She hadn’t wanted him and had given him away in exchange for the apartment. She had never really been much of a mother. He’d been raised mostly by boarding schools and daycare centers. Still, she’d been nicer to him then Nikky. To her, he was nothing but a nuisance and a drain on money she could have used to buy more crack.
Stephen thought of himself as an angel who had fallen from grace into a hell where savage Black devils waited to rend his flesh to ribbons and abscond with his soul. Each day was a misery and every sight, sound, and smell, was a profanity that mauled his senses and defiled his innocence.
His room was his only oasis. He had put a lock on the door and filled the room with books and comics. He kept a Walkman cassette player hidden under his bed so he could listen to music while he read horror novels. The books, along with most of the tapes, he’d stolen from Woolworths down on Germantown Avenue. No one really paid much attention to the book section. It wasn’t normally a major target of thieves. He would read Stephen King novels, and books by Harlan Ellison, Graham Masterson and then Clive Barker and Jack Ketchum, reading long into the night as dope fiends and crackheads, friends of Nikky and his dad, partied on the other side of the door.
They brought home an old Black and White TV one day that they’d stolen from somewhere and had been unable to sell. It only worked intermittently, but it was better than nothing. Stephen brought it into his room and it, along with the horror novels, and Heavy Metal tapes, became his escape from the hell of the ghetto.
During the night, he clutched his dad’s old .22 rifle to his chest; afraid that one of the dope fiends would break into his room and try to touch him. In the mornings, he crept through the piles of beer cans and liquor bottles, empty fast-food containers and junk-food wrappers, tip-toeing between the listless unconscious forms of his dad’s new friends. He would risk the inevitable beating and steal whatever money was left over from their late night binge then catch the subway to McDonalds at Broad Street and Columbia Ave before making his way to school. They were barely managing to survive off of welfare and so his dad had begun selling small quantities of cocaine to support his habit and keep them all from starving to death and being kicked out on the street. Even though the rent in their little project apartment was only $180 a month, it still had to be paid. Nikky still turned an occasional trick to help out as well.
Stephen was miserable and had stopped speaking to either his dad or Nikky. He just locked himself in his room and watched TV and read and dreamed of making enough money somehow to get back to New York, back his real mother whom he was sure must miss him terribly. In reality, the former Mrs. Liza Hechtman, who was now the current Mrs. Liza Newborn, had never really been cut out for motherhood and being rid of the moody young boy with the long curly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes that she had given birth to, had freed her to pursue her life with her new husband. He too, an artist who was ten years her junior and unemployed, was unsuited and uninterested in parenthood. Once a month she would send a child support check that Nikky and his dad promptly smoked up.
At school, little Stephen was the teacher’s pet. Smart, always eager to answer questions and help other kids, he couldn’t understand why the other children resented him so much.Although he was the only White kid in his neighborhood, at school there were a few other White kids who seemed to fit in just fine. But for him, school would be a hard test for many years until he started slangin’ caine.
Stephen was not a small boy by any means, but he had never been in a fight before attending school in North Philly and he had no idea how to defend himself. He was beaten up frequently but he never backed down, never gave up his lunch money, never let anyone steal his clothes or sneakers. Instead, he would take the ass-whipping. Each blow he received, to him, justified his hatred of Blacks and secretly, he took pleasure in it.
“You talk like a White boy.”
It was lunch time and Stephen was sitting in the cafeteria trying to choke down a peanut butter sandwich when a short, raggedy-looking, black kid with a chipped front tooth, and a patch of shiny crinkled skin on his forehead from where he had suffered a third degree burn, came walking up behind him. The kid had a short Jheri curl that had dried out and turned frizzy. He looked like a pre-adolescent junkie.
“I am White.”
“Yeah, but you sound like Richard Pryor doing an impersonation of a White boy. I didn’t even know people really talked like that. You sound like a little pussy talkin’ like that!”
“Man, just leave me alone.”
“Sound just like a little pussy! What else you got in that lunch bag, little pussy?”
“Boy, you are not getting my lunch.”
“Well, then you’d better give me some money so I can buy a lunch or else you gonna get your ass kicked!”
The idea of this short skinny little kid intimidating the much larger boy would have been laughable if it weren’t for the fact that Steven was white and to most kids in the projects, white boys were considered easy targets.
“Go ahead and kick my ass then!”
Steven stood up and when the boy saw that that Steven was taller than him he started to back off, but pride would not allow it, and once he started punching Steven he found him a willing victim who didn’t even try to fight back. Pretty soon, there was a crowd around the two boys. No one jumped in to break it up. For them, this was a rare and welcome sport. A break from the day’s monotony. Steven fell to the floor and curled into the fetal position. The crowd of spectators seemed to have been waiting for that moment, and moved in to do the North Philly stomp all over his cringing body as soon as he hit the floor. When a teacher’s aide finally intervened, Steven had suffered little more than a bloody nose and a few bruises, having done a successful job at covering himself from the blows, but his ego was grievously wounded. He’d had enough.
“What happened to you, son?”
“I just got my ass kicked! Like you fuckin care!”
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that! I’m your father!”
“When?! When are you ever my father?! When was the last time you were there for me?!”
“Stevie!” His mouth opened but nothing else would come out. He collapsed onto the ragged sofa with a look of defeat.
Stevie went into his bedroom and turned on the T.V. He pulled out the rifle, loaded it, and pointed it out the window. He pretended he was a KKK member in the deep south and he was hunting niggers who had raped innocent little white girls. He took aim at the group of black kids under the street lamp, but only pretended to fire. He imagined explosions of blood; muscle and bone avulsed, penetrated, and pulverized as the bullets tore through vital organs. He felt energized. He had almost forgotten the indiginity he’d suffered at the hands of the battle scarred young black boy, but then when he remembered him and imagined turning the rifle on him and seeing the terror in his eyes, a new and delicious thrill electrified his nervous system. With a gun in his hand, he realized he would never be a victim again.
The next day, Steven stayed home from school. At 3 o’clock he left his house with the .22 rifle under his arm and started to walk to school. At 3:15 p.m., as the kids made their way home from school, Steven walked up, found a spot across the street, got down on one knee, and lined up the sites. A tall gawky girl in pig tails was the first to see him.
“Hey! That kid’s got a gun!” she screamed.
Steven fired and the little boy, Harold Green, age ten, the youngest of eight children, a C+ student, bed wetter, comic book collector, junk food junkie, bully, folded in half, and flew backwards several feet. The high powered projectiles disemboweled the poor kid. He clutched his stomach and tiny pink, blue, and purple loops of intestines unraveled and spilled out between his fingers. Steven Jr. had fired three times, and all three shots had caught little Harold in the gut, eviscerating him. Harold lingered for four days after the five hours of surgery to repair his lacerated entrails. On the fifth day he died of shock brought on by infection. Little Stevie spent less than a day in jail for the crime.
One of his fathers high powered Wall Street lawyer friends made the trip down to Philly, and ripped the asshole out of the young inexperienced prosecutor who was assigned to the case. He paid Steven’s bail, and took him back to the projects. The district attorney’s office decided not to prosecute due to lack of evidence, despite the possession of nearly a dozen signed statements of witnesses who claimed they could positively identify the little white boy as the killer. Charges were dropped and little Stevie Hetchman Jr. went right back to his miserable little life. But things had changed. Mr Hechtman’s Wall Street buddy was appalled to see how low his friend had sunk and offered to lend him a few dollars to get back on his feet. That few dollars was about twenty thousand, and the senior Steven Hechtman, still the financial genius, used that money to launch his own little drug business, and in the projects, business was booming.
