for a walk on the moon. Off I’d speed towards Tommy Hill and there I’d stay ’til I lost all feeling in my extremities and Mom would have to hold my hands and feet under hot water while I screamed and cried as feeling returned in an onrush of white hot pain.
The hill looked like a swarm of ants on an ice-cream cone as kids from all over raced down the hill. The White kids who actually lived in that neighborhood had long ago been driven off after several violent confrontations with some of G-town’s hardest. The few that did venture out were quickly relieved of any valuable possessions and sent home with bloody noses, missing teeth, busted lips, or blackened eyes, and sometimes worse. G-town had staked its claim.
Freezing winds scoured our faces, cutting into our skin like icy razor blades as we recklessly careened down the hill catching air and landing in sprays of snow. Inevitably someone crashed into a tree and had to be taken to the hospital, but as soon as the ambulance left we would all start flying down the hill again; careful to steer around the red snow.
It was rumored that the hill had been named after a kid who’d been killed sledding down it a hundred years ago. I couldn’t remember anyone ever dying while we were out there, but bruises, lacerations, and concussions were an everyday thing.
One day during Christmas vacation, after spending hours racing up and down the hill, we were walking home when a bunch of kids who were throwing snowballs at cars on Green Street decided that we would make better targets.
“Get those muthafuckas over there!” one kid yelled and suddenly the sky became a blizzard of frozen projectiles. The snowballs were mostly slush and we were soaking wet in seconds. A short stocky kid with snot running down his face like a fat black soda fountain with a leak picked up a big piece of ice and threw it, hitting Nikky in the face, cutting his lip and bloodying his nose. Nikky started crying and sat down in the snow holding his face. The rest of the kids zeroed in on him and began bombing him with snowballs as he wailed and sobbed and screamed for them to stop. I ran across the street breathless with rage and dove on the short kid. I was pounding the kid’s head into the snow when the other boys started kicking and punching me, dragging me off of the snotty nosed boy.
There were more than eight of them and fists and feet struck me from all angles as I swung blindly trying to connect with anything. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Nikky rush over and fight his way through to my side. They were surprised by Nikky’s attack and for a moment it almost looked like they would retreat, then one of them tackled Nikky and they all started stomping and kicking him as he struggled to get up. They ran off and left us both bleeding in the snow freezing half to death. Worst of all, they had stolen our sleds.
I looked at Nikky and he looked at me. We both looked like shit. Black eyes and busted lips. We started to laugh. At that moment we knew that we were truly the best of friends. I had gotten his back when he had needed it and he had gotten my back in return and even though we had both gotten our asses kicked it had been worth it to learn the depths of our friendship.
We never went back to Tommy Hill after that. I couldn’t afford a new sled and even though Warlock would have given Nikky anything he wanted, he wouldn’t have gone to the hill without me. It was all for the best anyway. A week later they found some Muslim lady buried in the snow up there. She had been pregnant and someone had torn her baby out of her womb. They said it looked like the killer had used his bare hands and teeth to rip out her unborn child. I thought that had to be bullshit. No one was that sick.
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Chapter 4
—Jean Paul Sartre
««—»»
In school I was always getting into trouble. Even though I made good grades, got perfect scores on all my tests, and did most of my homework, I was constantly getting into fights.
Anyone who dissed me would wind up with missing teeth and because of my raggedy clothes I got dissed a lot until they saw how fearsomely I fought. They started calling me Snap because of my bad temper. Even my teachers called me Snap. My viciousness even caused Nikky to distance himself from me. We hung out around the way, but at school he treated me like a wet food stamp. I understood where he was coming from though. I would have preferred to be anonymous and invisible like him, but he wasn’t getting teased like I was. Warlock saw to it that Nikky was never out of fashion. He never wore the same jeans two days in a row. His clothes didn’t fit too tight because he’d grown out of them before the income tax return check came. His shoes didn’t have holes in them and his jacket didn’t have the name of the kid who’d owned it before your mother purchased it from the goodwill written on the inside collar. But for me, with my exhausted retrograde wardrobe, life would have been unbearable if I didn’t hold the entire school in fear. Even still their whispered insults shadowed me through the halls as they hurled them silently at my back.
When Tank and Huey transferred to our school, everyone began trying to instigate a war of the hoodrats. They couldn’t wait to see us get that shit on.
“Did you see that big muthafucka from North Philly? You know him and Snap ‘gonna wind up thumpin’. I hope he kicks that crazy nigga’s ass! Snap think can’t nobody beat his ass. I can’t wait to see Tank get a hold of ’im.” Every hallway in school echoed with some variation of this same refrain. I wanted to squeeze each and every one of their voiceboxes shut to keep that noise out of my head.
After hearing so much about these new kids from North Philadelphia’s notorious Richard Allen projects, I wanted to see what they were all about. I had already subjugated the entire 5th grade with ease and I wanted to know if their really were two kids that were my match. At that time I considered myself unbeatable. I was eager to fight these two fools and get it over with. They had already tangled with several guys whom I had fought in the past and beaten them just as easily as I had and to be truthful it was making me kind of anxious. When the day finally came it was like high noon in a spaghetti western.
I was on my way to lunch when the biggest blackest kid I could ever remember seeing lumbered towards me. He was at least 5’5” tall and about 160lbs (which was gigantic for a ten-year-old) and as black as death and sin. He was too solid to be called fat. He seemed to be stuffed full of sand or rocks like my dad’s old handmade punching bag and even though his gut stuck out about five inches in front of him nothing on him jiggled. His hair was all nappy and uncombed though he had one of those big wooden brushes sticking out of his back pocket.
His clothes were outdated, ill-fitting, and dirty just like mine, but you could tell he didn’t give a fuck just as easily as you could tell that I did. His eyes were big and round with heavy eyelids that covered half his eyes making him look constantly tired or bored. As he lumbered toward me down the hall I could hear his loud ponderous breathing reminding me of the way the shark Darryl had caught once on a deep sea fishing trip had sounded before he clubbed it to death and threw it back overboard. I remember feeling sorry for the shark that day, but right then I kind of wished I had a club myself.
In “The G,” and I suspect in every ghetto in Philly if not the entire East Coast, when two males pass each other on the street or in a hallway a contest of wills begins. It’s called who will yield and move out of the other one’s way. First we look into each other’s eyes to assess the degree of threat. If the guy looks away or smiles at you then you hog the entire sidewalk and make him walk on the grass or in the street. But if he mad-dogs you like this big angry thug was doing to me and doesn’t give up any ground then it’s on and you have to choose whether to be a bitch and back down or be a man and fight. Sometimes you both look at each other and mutually decide that you’re too evenly matched and silently consent to both yield a little ground each so that you may pass without bumping shoulders. The entire “contest” takes seconds and happens dozens of times a day, but only rarely results in a fight. There are only so many alpha males and most of the betas know their place. But when Tank came swaggering down the hallway we both knew that neither of us would back down. For no good reason than that it had become my instinct to fight, I put myself even more directly in his path and gave him my hardest look. We slammed into each other chest to chest.
“Nigga is you crazy bumpin’ into me! I should kick your fuckin’ ass!” Tank bellowed in a voice that sounded way too deep to have come from a kid. He put both his hands on my chest and shoved hard. At first I was amazed and didn’t quite know what to do. It had been a long time since anyone had treated me that way. There seemed to
