“Why you steal?”
“I needed money.” This wasn’t the entire truth. Sometimes I stole just to steal. Anything could be mine. The world became less cruel.
“If you want, just ask.”
The next week she made me go to Macy’s with her. Had me pick out a new pair of jeans. Said now I’d have no excuse to steal. I grabbed a pair of overalls. I knew my mom felt guilty, blaming our lack of money for my behavior, and I played along. Sometimes I saw my mother as just another adult to manipulate and deceive.
I wore the overalls on the first day back to school with both straps unbuckled. The front flap hung. I let the pants sag. I had no belt, and they were a size or two larger than necessary. There didn’t seem to be any other way to wear them.
squeeze
Around the corner from my house lived a guy named Levi. He was a dap-giving fanatic. He couldn’t get through a sentence without exchanging pounds. For a few months we were road dogs, in-fuckin-separable. A couple of years later, he’d be out there hustling on the corner, but back then he hadn’t started down that path. He was a tagger, a rookie, and I was showing him the ropes. I played the big brother, at least when it came to writing. I vouched for him to join TFB. Plus, he and I also formed our own crew, FMW, the name self-aggrandizing like all crew names: Frisco’s Most Wanted. Claiming multiple crews simultaneously, juggling competing loyalties, was a part of the game.
I hooked Levi up with a legit marker, the tip as wide as a baseball card, not that puny toy shit from Walgreens. I taught him how to hold a marker at the correct angle. His tag name was FBS, Full Blooded Samoan, but his mom was Filipino. I never saw his father.
Once, me and Levi were on a bus, making our way to the rear door, and he said, “Watch this.” We were standing over three girls sitting side by side chatting in Chinese. Their hair wasn’t styled in any memorable way. No gel or hairspray. I thought Levi might hit his name up before we got off, so I kept my eyes on the driver, but Levi tapped me on the arm. “I said, watch, blood.”
He reached down, rammed his hand between the thighs of the middle girl, and squeezed the crotch of her acid-washed jeans. His fingers were a clamp. He jiggled her while she tried to jerk away.
The beep from the rear door signaled our stop. The green light above the exit lit up. Levi bulled past me. “C’mon,” he said. I was still staring at the girl’s crotch. She had meaty thighs. Her mom probably called her fat. Feih Mui. She wore raggedy sneakers.
“Motherfucker, you coming?” Levi was holding the door open for me.
I leapt off the bus, and the rear door swung closed.
I wasn’t innocent. I used to grab women’s asses and run. I learned from Jim. On crowded buses, he’d brush his hand over a girl’s behind, then cup it, right before he ran off the bus. Once, we followed a woman wearing a business skirt up a staircase near a plaza. It was my turn. I squeezed her ass and took off down the stairwell before she could turn around. I felt comfortable enough doing this sort of thing that I once did it on a family trip to Lake Tahoe. At the buffet line of a restaurant, when I saw a woman in a wool dress lean over the buffet table to scoop pasta from a serving tray, I grabbed her butt, and I didn’t run. I don’t know what I expected to happen, but what she did in response, I hadn’t even considered, though it was the obvious reaction: she slapped me. Not my face but my shoulder. Her mouth was agape. Before she could form any words, I fled back to my table carrying an empty plate. I had a cousin get my food, and I spent the rest of the dinner with one hand shielding my face.
Levi watched the girl through the window as the bus pulled off. “You seen her face?” He leaned on my shoulder and laughed. He slapped palms with me, but I didn’t slide my fingers to interlock mine with his. They were the same fingers that had clamped the girl.
“You know you wrong for that,” I said, but my words weren’t firm, chuckles mixed in between. I gave Levi a light shove off the curb, and he continued across the street to our projects, screaming “FMW.” It was a two-man crew, just me and him, and we had no intentions of expanding.
garbage
When my mother was out by herself, men constantly approached her. They’d say corny stuff like: “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” I’m sure there were also vulgar comments, but she never repeated them to me. Sometimes a white guy would hand her a business card: “Modeling Agent.” Some would follow her around in their cars. Once, my sister had to check a guy that was staring at our mom a little too intently. “You got a fucking staring problem?” she said.
Our mom, decked in red, walked the streets with Guinness-World-Record long hair, which everybody stared at, not just men, but women, kids, old folks. Some women would pay her compliments, ask her how long she’d been growing it out. Others would frown in disapproval, as though my mom was nothing but an attention whore. Either way, people scanning her hair up and down made me feel like these strangers were gawking at my mother naked.
When she’d throw out the garbage at night, after dinner and cleaning up the house, she’d have a homier look. Hair
