A flock of pigeons dawdled on Market Street, chests puffed out as if patrolling their grounds. They didn’t scatter when we approached till SHIM charged at them. I could hear skateboards, their wheels rolling on the ground.
“If the white boy says anything stupid,” Hollywood said, “bust his shit with the quickness.” He threw a haymaker in the air.
Skateboarders lounged on the concrete steps that rimmed the brick plaza of the Embarcadero. They took baggy pants to another level—the potato-sack look. They wore their hats perfectly backwards, not the least off-centered, as though for aerodynamic reasons. One leapt off a platform, his board flipped underneath him, rider and board reuniting on the landing. No adult in sight. This was before the Giants ballpark was built by the waterfront, before tracks were laid behind the plaza for vintage trolleys, before the ferry building across the street with its clock tower received a face-lift, the former baggage area transforming into an upscale marketplace, chic restaurants calling the renovated building home. Before all of that, the immediate vicinity around the Embarcadero Plaza would be abandoned at night, and the plaza belonged to skaters, an unintentional gift, their lair, their jungle gym.
“Which one?” SIKE asked.
“Don’t give them one of the little ones,” CLUE said.
“Nah,” TYMER said, “can’t make it that easy.”
On the far side was a fountain, a monstrous sculpture, a family of cubic tentacles that bent and twisted around each other. Water would pour from the faces of the tentacles, square holes, but this night they were dry, the basin an empty pool.
Two skaters coasted towards us on their boards. The one with dreadlocks greeted TYMER. They knew one another. At first the guy tried to dissuade us, but when that didn’t work he asked us not to pick on his friends. Instead, he offered up a group of skaters he said nobody gave a shit about.
“I bet one of them got some bread,” Hollywood said. “RANK, SHIM—showtime.”
We mobbed across the plaza. Skating ceased. I tightened my fists and recalled a scene from Malcolm X where a fellow inmate explains to Malcolm that the white man is the Devil. Malcolm flashes back to the white men he has known. All seem evil. My best friend in middle school, a white kid, would pull his eyes back to slant them at me. “Go back to your own neighborhood,” a white cop had said. “Do that stuff there.” A white bus driver had testified she saw me tagging on her bus. The red marker she swore she saw me passing to Rob was actually red Play-Doh. I hadn’t written a thing and showed the judge photos of the bus. None of the graffiti was red, yet the white judge found me guilty. He’d made my mom pay a $271 fine and sentenced me to scrub buses.
I needed more fuel. I thought historically: slavery, genocide, rape.
“That one in the middle,” TYMER said.
The skater he referred to sat slouched, smoking a cigarette, his board at his feet. He didn’t appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed—the only skater in his group not to notice us marching toward them—but he was bigger than me, a little on the chubby side, someone it wouldn’t be wise for me to wrestle. He didn’t look up until SHIM and I stood over him. His friends inched away.
“What’s up, man,” he said innocently.
SHIM looked at me as though it were my turn to go. Everything I thought of saying sounded like something from Menace II Society.
SHIM patted the pockets of the skater’s cargo pants, and I followed his lead.
“Hey, what are you doing?” The skater dropped his cigarette and pushed my hand away, but not with much force, as though not wanting to antagonize me.
SHIM dug his hand deep into one of the pockets. I reached into another pocket and pulled out some change. I opened my palm: a nickel and a few pennies.
“That’s all I got,” he said. He took out his keys and a bus transfer and turned his pockets inside out. We fingered the lining of each pocket, but there was nothing, not even lint.
I tried to hand the coins to TYMER.
“Fuck I’m going to do with that?”
“He’s got to have more,” SHIM said. He patted down the skater’s socks.
The guy apologized profusely.
I kicked his board to the side.
“This don’t count,” CLUE said, laughing. He shook his hand in the air, as though waving the whole thing off.
“Bust his shit, RANK,” Wood said.
I had seconds to make a move. The window would close and boom—RANK’s a sucka. Told you. But what if my swing missed? Or if it landed but weakly? Or if he fought back? My first punch had to be a knockout. I had to swing with anger, rage, revenge. Go bonkers.
I thought I smelled my father, but it was just the skater’s cigarette burning on the ground. My father’s story might’ve been complicated, but my version was simple. He’d abandoned us; he was an asshole. He’d slapped my mother to the floor, her hair tied up in a bun coming undone.
SHIM threw the first punch, his only punch, a cross that snapped the skater’s head back. His pasty neck was exposed. I pounced on him. A barrage of punches to the head. His torso fell back onto the platform, and he rolled his head side to side to dodge my blows. He tried to kick me away, but it only made me pummel him harder. When he’d lift his head up, I’d hammer it back onto the platform, his head knocking
