This was the type of genius black folks never got credit for. This kid was probably failing English class yet he could write rhymes with themes, imagery, and rhythms more complex and profound than 99% of the garbage they were teaching us in school. Walt Whitman could kiss my black ass! This was true poetry!
“Man, that wasn’t no rap! I-I don’t know what the fuck that was!” Devin thought for a second and then shook Nikky’s hand, “Yo, but that shit was dope, bro. You gots mad skills!”
“Yo, homes that was the freshest shit I ever heard!”
Yeah, I said fresh. That was like ’93. You could still say fresh in ’93. Couldn’t you?
“Fresh?”
“Aaaaaahahahaha! That fool said the shit was fresh! Naw, bro. It’s dope! It’s butta! It’s ill! It’s sick! But fresh went out with the eighties, son!” Warlock draped an arm around my shoulder still laughing so hard that tears were squeezing out of the corners of his bloodshot eyes.
“Alright, then that shit was sick as fuck!”
“That’s my nigga!” Warlock whooped.
Nikky smiled awkwardly at my unselfconscious admiration and seemed to grow even more uncomfortable if that was even possible.
“Yeah, Nikky’s got a mind like my nine. Mutherfuckin’ cocked and loaded, baby boy. You know he’s in that mentally gifted program at school. They got him reading all kinds of ill shit. Philosphy, literature, poetry. That’s were he gets most of the material for his rhymes.”
“I knew he didn’t make that shit up himself.” Devin declared triumphantly.
“He does make it up himself, fool. The words are his. He just gets the ideas from the books and shit. Fuck am I talkin’ to your bitch ass for anyway? You lost, nigga. Now get the fuck up off my car. We outta here, son. Got some business to take care of. You wanna ride along little homie?” Warlock asked, grinning at me with his braces shining in the afternoon sun.
“Sure.”
Warlock slid behind the wheel of the big Lincoln and Nikky and I bounced into the backseat. He pulled out some top paper and a sack of weed the size of a handbag and began rolling a joint. His bony effeminate fingers caressed the rolling papers almost lovingly as he sprinkled the marijuana down into it like a French chef seasoning a souffle, holding it between thumbs and middle fingers with his index fingers sticking out and up in the air. He whipped his long narrow tongue along the edge of the paper, gave it several twists to close it, fired it up with a gold zippo lighter, took a long hit, and then passed it to me as he started to cough.
“This is some good shit.” He wheezed between coughs.
All of this happened in what seemed like seconds. I held the joint in my hands and looked over at Nikky who smiled at me and waved me on impatiently. I took a huge hit and immediately began coughing convulsively.
Fifteen minutes later we were all cruising around the hood passing the joint around. It was the first time I had ever gotten high and my head felt like it was filled with helium. My thoughts sloshed around my head in an inarticulate jumble and came out of my mouth the same way.
“Yo, my niggas, we need to get us some of those cheeseburgers from Mickey D’s or some Tasty Kakes or some shit. I’m hungry as a muthafucka! You know they don’t put enough chips in them potato chip bags. They all full of air now. Damn pretzels supposed to be soft, but they hard as a mutherfucka. I don’t want none of them big Jewish pickles neither! They look like Frankenstein’s dick. Pass me that joint, nigga!”
Warlock and Nikky laughed every time I spoke, which made me laugh as well. I was tore up from the floor up, rolling around in the backseat of the Continental, giggling and dropping marijuana ashes all over the brand new blue suede upholstery.
“Fool, don’t you set my seats on fire back there! Pass me that shit before you waste it all!”
Warlock, Nikky, and I started hanging out everyday after that; getting high and composing rap lyrics. Sometimes I would go bombing with them. We would fill our backpacks with Krylon or Rustoleum spray paint stolen from the hardware store. Warlock insisted that we steal it even though he had enough money to buy the store out. That was part of the tradition he said.
“Only toy muthafuckas buy the shit. Real bombers steal it! Guerilla warfare, my nigga! Artistic terrorism!”
We would hit the school yards at both of the neighborhood elementary schools and both Martin Luther King and Germantown High, then we would hop on the back of the SEPTA rail trains, ride them, to the end of the line, and tag trains down in the yard.
Hopping the trains was no joke. Tulpehocken station was a shack that stood behind a plush exclusive retirement home engulfed in a mayhem of lewd, incoherent, iconoclastic, scribblings. Tremendous evergreen trees jutted up twenty or thirty feet in the air on the other side of the tracks and a carefully maintained lawn spread out lavishly from the station to the old folks’ home.
On our side of the tracks was a crumbling parking lot overlooked by dilapidated apartment buildings. White folks from Wissahickon and Black folks from G-town sat together on the benches beneath grafitti that read “Big Mike Rules!” or “Jane sucks dick and drinks cum!” casting nervous glances at one another as they waited to catch the train down to jobs as economically segregated as the neighborhoods they left behind.
It was here that we would come, scrambling over the tracks carrying backpacks filled with stolen Krylon spray paint. The train would thunder down the track with its whistle cutting the calm like a scythe and we would wait for the passengers to climb aboard before sneaking onto the back of the train and holding on for dear life. Mile after mile the train rambled along, lurching through turns with its iron wheels squealing against the rails and the wind whipping tears from our eyes and splaying them across our cheeks.
We passed through a half dozen different neighborhoods including North Philadelphia, which looked like a post-apocalyptic nightmare where the ozone layer had opened up and scorched the earth to ruin and only the melanin in black skin had allowed for survivors. As the train made its way through and the depressed weather-torn houses with sagging roofs, rotting paint, and shattered windows loomed into view looking worse than the death camps at Auschwitz, the entire train would go silent. This was the roughest, poorest section of Philadelphia marked by hills of garbage, thigh high weeds, packs of soot covered children chasing each other through barren fields of rusted cars and occasionally shooting at one another, miniscule yards filled with trash and savage, half-starved mongrels chained to rusted fences that snarled at us as we rumbled past, and tired old men rocking on front porches while nursing bottles of wine and watching the crackwhores strut past them offering their withered and diseased bodies for less than the price of a happy meal.
The graffiti in this area was mostly gravestones with epitaphs that read “Rest In Peace” and “We Miss You” followed by the names of fallen friends and sometimes graphically illustrated murals depicting the precise manner in which their loved ones had met their end. Guns, knives, needles, and base pipes, told the tale of life’s cessation in that unimaginable hell. Often these murals included threats of retaliation. The entire cycle of violence immortalized on cracked and crumbling brick walls.
As we rode through we tried to imagine living amid that poverty which seemed many times worse than our own and found our minds unequal to the task. North Philly seemed like death not life. It was amazing that anything lived there at all and each child that made it to adulthood was like a miracle. It was inconceivable how these people could survive when most of us barely had a roof over our heads and food on our tables. Silent prayers of thanks would issue from every lip.
It was particularly distressing to Nikky and Warlock because they had both been born there and only Warlock’s illegal business activities kept them from tumbling headlong back into that cesspit.
Finally, the train would make its final stop and pull into the trainyard. We would all creep away before the conductor could find us; pulling out our cans of spray paint eagerly hunting for the train upon which we would make our existence omnipresent.
“They want to just tuck us away in the slums and ghettoes and forget about us. But see that’s where we come in, the graffiti artists. You go all city with some dope ass mural and now they can’t forget about you. Every time they look up at a wall, a billboard, a subway train, there you are, fuckin’ up the program.”
I wasn’t really much of a graffiti artist. While they were doing burners and wild styles with all kinds of characters in them, I was writing my name in bubble letters. Besides, bombing trains was dangerous as hell. I had already gotten blasted in the back with a shotgun filled with rock salt by one of the security guards in the trainyard and even though it didn’t do any damage it hurt like a motherfucker. A kid from around the way had fallen off and
