I didn’t look up from watching TV. If I said anything, my words would only fuel her anger.
“Maybe you need furniture for your new place,” she said. “I’ll help.” She picked up a chair and hurled it into the courtyard. Rob happened to be walking by.
“You OK, Maggie?” he asked.
She shook her head like a pitcher shaking off the signs of their catcher. “Take my son,” she said, waving him inside our house. “Please Robert. Sure. Sure.”
It wasn’t obvious to Rob that she was being sarcastic, or maybe it wasn’t obvious to me that she wasn’t. I pointed with my head for Rob to leave.
“You don’t want to graduate,” she said to me. “Why wait, you can be a bum now.” My mom picked up another chair and heaved it outside, knocking against the chain-link fence of the garden.
Rob took a step back. “I think I heard my mom call.” He turned and hurried upstairs.
Granny from next door—who my mother called Ms. Johnson—came over. Probably heard the noise. The walls were thin. She lived with her two daughters who also had daughters. “There ain’t no need for all this,” she said to my mom.
My mom said something to her, and Granny shot me a look. Next thing I knew my mother had her head on Granny’s shoulder, and Granny was stroking her back.
the key to the combination
In front of a boarded-up building on Haight and Fillmore, we were huddled in clusters, waiting for the two leaders of 3F to arrive. They were to decide whether or not SHIM would join the tagging crew. He was a goofy dude. He’d smile to himself and make animal noises, the sound perhaps of a dying hyena. It seemed 3F was lowering their standards, and that’s why Hollywood had brought me here. “If they letting SHIM join,” he’d said, “that loser, they gotta let you in.”
Strolling by that night was 4-Tay. His hair, set in finger waves, cascaded down to his shoulders. I recognized him from his album cover. He stopped to give a pound to a couple of us, though I doubted they knew him personally. It felt too hit-and-run for that. Probably just a Fillmore show of love.
The smell of weed lingered in the air. Night had snuck up on us. The neon sign of a pizza shop had lit up. Headlights cruised by. None of the guys had said anything about me showing up unexpectedly with Hollywood to this meeting for 3F, Fresh Fillmoe Funk. If anybody was Fillmoe it was Hollywood. He tagged “Fillmoe” almost as often as his graffiti name, which actually wasn’t Hollywood. That was his nickname. How he got that, or what his real name was, I didn’t know. We’d only begun hanging out that summer. His graffiti name was SYMER, but no one called him by that. What the hell was a symer? Granted, plenty of guys chose tags for themselves that ended in “-er,” many of which sounded nonsensical—SIZER, KRYMER, VESTER, but at least these were based on actual words. It was hard to take Wood seriously as a writer. His style was unrefined, the loop in his R always too low. But he was down to fight, and I don’t mean if he was backed in a corner. The dude hunted for fools from rival turfs, though he was no bigger than me. He flaunted his set by wearing a custom-designed baseball hat, the kind hardcore cats from the Moe were rocking at the time—name and your turf airbrushed in bubble letters dotted with rhinestones.
My pager vibrated in my jean pocket. It was my mom. Probably wanted to complain about how I’d missed dinner. Or maybe she wanted to tell me she was staying at Willie’s for the weekend and had left some pasta in the fridge. Staying at his house was a new thing, a compromise, her response to his cheating. His defense had been that he’d left his wife years ago for her, but she had yet to divorce my father. He needed more of a commitment. I told my mom not to fall for his crap. “Shifting the blame is the oldest trick in the book,” I’d said. “I use it all the time.”
I thought she’d really leave him. She’d tell us to pick up the phone for her, and if it was Willie, to say she was out. I was used to doing that with my father, so I had no problem lying to another guy who had hurt my mom. But eventually, my mother gave in, and it was back to only lying to one man for her.
A bus approached. I stuffed my pager back in my pocket. All of us rushed to the curb, pushing each other aside for a better view. Wood’s tag sailed by on the window of the bus. Black smoke belched from the exhaust. “I stay running,” Wood shouted, as though he scored a goal. He had beady eyes and a rough-looking face, wrinkles you wouldn’t think a sixteen-year-old would have.
“Why you here?” TYMER, the co-leader of 3F, said to me. His annoyance was so exaggerated I assumed he was playing around. I hadn’t noticed when he arrived, though he was one of the tallest in our bunch. He wore a Rasta beanie and army fatigues.
“It’s about time my boy RANK get in 3F,” Hollywood said and slapped my chest. I rocked back, the blow harder than was probably intended.
“That right?” TYMER said to me.
“Sure, why not?” I said.
“Motherfucker, do you want in or not?” TYMER said.
“Yeah, I’ll hit up 3F.”
TYMER pulled aside the other leader, SIKE, who twisted his short dreads and nodded along. I thought I was in. Joining a crew had always been this easy. No hoops or hurdles. We weren’t gangs on some blood-in-blood-out shit. If you were cool with the leader, you were a shoo-in. And
