She slipped me a fat-ass sack of green bud. The kind of shit nobody can get in Philly. The smell alone was starting to get me high.
“Where the fuck did you get this from?”
“My sister lives in Northern California, in Marin County, and her fiance grows the shit.”
“You a little hustler, huh? Yeah, we’re most definitely gonna hook up.”
I caught up to Huey and we walked around the corner, back to the Impala. We drove over to the State Store on Second Street. State Stores, as the name implies, are run by the State of Pennsylvania and are the only legal place where you can buy liquor in Philly.
We were both still under age so we had to bribe this old derelict into going in there for us. We bought a bottle of M.D. 20/20 and some Tangueray. Then we went to the corner store and bought some orange juice and a couple forties of Colt 45.
We snuck the orange juice and the Tangueray into a movie theatre on Chestnut Street and kicked back to watch Steven Seagal’s overweight ass do some weak Aikido moves while his gut protruded over his jeans and with arms as skinny as a woman’s wrist. We were so high that we were actually enjoying it though.
“Look at that fat mutherfucker. I’d whoop that bitch’s ass!” Huey whooped at the screen.
A fight broke out in the back of the theater and for once we didn’t get involved and make shit worse. We turned our backs on the movie screen to watch two gangs of kids just a few years younger than us threaten each other loudly without throwing a blow. It went on for almost twenty minutes before fists finally began to fly.
“Either start throwing or shut the fuck up so we can watch the damn movie!” an Old Gangsta yelled from the front while his girlfriend—who was decked in fur, platinum, and enough ice to chill a twelve pack— hugged his side.
Once it began it lasted less than a minute. The smaller group was chased out of the theater by the larger group and we all just went back to watching the movie.
An hour and a half passed before we staggered out of the theater and piled back into my Impala. We were torn down from the Tangueray and juice, but we were still not high enough to stop thinking about Tank. As soon as the movie ended the image of him lying in that casket came rushing back to us. We started talking to keep our minds off of it.
Huey seemed to be in a much better mood. We laughed and joked as we drove down the Parkway and onto Kelly Drive. The Schuykill River was the same shit brown it had always been, yet in our intoxicated state, with the setting sun sparkling over the waters, it looked like the most tranquil and beautiful place on earth. We pulled into a parking area along the riverfront and cracked open the Mad Dog.
Huey and I sat there for hours talking about nothing. Anytime the memory of Tank’s murder tried to intrude its way back into my consciousness I would tell a joke or something. But it was unavoidable. Eventually the conversation lulled and we both started thinking about Tank.
Tears streamed down our faces as we drained the bottle of MD and reminisced about our dead brother.
“Why don’t you roll up some of that Cali weed you got from that gray bitch? I ain’t fucked up enough yet,” Huey slurred.
I pulled out the baggy and the box of papers and rolled us the fattest joint I could manage. We lit up and passed it back and forth as we watched the sun crash into the horizon and explode across the sky in fiery reds and oranges.
“Tank would have loved this shit. You know how that nigga loved his weed.”
“Yeah, he stayed high. I don’t know how he could function as much weed as he smoked.”
“I remember one time we were doin’ a driveby on these JBGL muthafuckas and Tank had just lit up this fat ass joint. So we roll up along side these niggas and Tank pulls the AK out of his lap and while he’s swinging it out the window he knocks the joint out his mouth. You know that crazy muthafucka puts the AK down to pick up the joint? By the time he picked the rifle up again them fools had scattered. I laughed my ass off. Scratch was mad as hell that night and Tank just looked at him like ‘Hey, shit happens,’ and kept on smoking his blunt.”
Huey and I laughed hard at that even as the tears continued to fall. When we finally left the river I could hardly see straight I was so high.
“Damn, that was some good weed!”
“Hell yeah it was. Maybe I was wrong about that gray bitch. She might come in handy after all. Where you want to go now?”
“You ready to go back ’round the way?”
“Naw, ain’t shit to see there now. Besides, I don’t want to go watch my mom cry or deal with Iesha askin’ me a bunch of annoying ass questions trying to get me to express my feelings and shit. Don’t bitches realize that men ain’t like that? The last thing a man wants to do when he’s depressed is sit around and talk about why he’s depressed. You just want to forget about that shit. Get high. Get fucked. Whatever. You just want to forget. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“True indeed. Let’s just drive around for a while then.”
I hadn’t intended on driving back to the cemetery but somehow we both knew that was where we were going. We pulled through the gates of the Cheltenham Cemetery just as twilight darkened into night.
There were no lights in the cemetery. Huey and I staggered around in the dark for the better part of an hour trying to find Tank’s grave. Since we hadn’t attended the burial we didn’t even have the faintest clue which direction to look in and checking each headstone with no illumination except my disposable Bic lighter was tedious.
Huge gravestones, monuments, and crypts the size of small garages crammed every corner of the century old cemetery casting eerie shadows that recalled memories of old horror movies. We were so intoxicated that we were actually enjoying the search and the crawling superstitious dread that followed us as we stomped on earth beneath which the dead slumbered. We giggled as we tripped over gravestones and bumped into the large statues that marked many of the older graves.
“This is the older section. He ain’t buried over here. He should be over there where all those little plaques are.”
We were in total darkness by the time we found Tank’s modest little headstone, which was little more than a plaque stuck in the ground as Huey had said. We collapsed upon it in exhaustion and cracked open our forties. I eulogized our brother in my own way as Huey stared on in silence.
“I remember how we all met. Remember how we almost killed each other and then wound up becoming best friends? Who’d have believed that shit? We terrorized that neighborhood so bad them niggas ain’t never gonna forget you. I won’t ever forget you, bro. You were my dog, my brother. Even if we didn’t share the same blood or come out of the same womb we shared the same spirit, the same soul. We been tighter than any two muthafuckas ever could be. We fought together. We laughed together. We got high together. We killed together. After all that time it was just in the last two or three days that I really got to know your big ass. I loved you man. You was one bad ass-kickin’ muthafucka and the game won’t be the same without you. I’m gonna miss you, bro.”
We poured our forties out on his grave.
“I wish there was some way we could have gotten him a cheesesteak hoagie to take on his journey. I know he’s hungry. That nigga’s always hungry.”
“I was just thinking about planting some weed on his grave. That would guarantee everybody from the hood would visit him.”
I stared at Tank’s modest little gravestone and something about it started to annoy me. They had put Tank’s real name on it, Anthony Turner, instead of the name by which he was known to all his friends and family. I took out a paint marker and wrote over the name in big silver letters;
“Rest in peace, my brother.”
We laid down on Tank’s grave, resting our heads on his stone. We rolled up some more of the weed and I took the seeds out and planted them in front of the headstone. We both inhaled deeply, choking and coughing, as we watched the clouds uncover the moon and the few stars that were visible through the city pollution wink on and off like Christmas lights. We were both wondering if Tank’s soul had made it into heaven.
“I hope Tank is up there kickin’ God’s ass right now.”
“Man, don’t say shit like that, Snap.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause it ain’t cool to be talkin’ about God like that.”
“Don’t tell me you still into all that Muslim shit? I thought you gave that shit up when the Trade Center got
