To this day, I have no idea where my pops is at. Even if I wanted to find him, I have no idea where to start looking. Those little bits Moms told me when I was older are all I really know about him. I want to know who he is, what else we have in common. Even though he tricked my mother, I was still his son. What features did I get from him? What habits? What disorders? Just a whole lot of questions I’ll never know the answers to.
*
For the first twelve years of my life, it was just me and my mom. We were always close. She raised me from a boy into the respectable man I am now, and did it on her own during the Ed Koch era, some of the wildest times New York City has ever seen.
The 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s were probably the city’s most violent times. Even before crack hit, NYC was teetering on bankruptcy. A lot of social programs got slashed, if not cut from the city’s budget altogether.
All five boroughs had violent neighborhoods. Muggings, robberies, rape, assaults, and murders were all too common. You couldn’t ride the train too late. Before crack, heroin was flowing, coke was flowing. Pimps, prostitutes, corrupt cops; all the New York City clichés were present and thriving.
Growing up, you always had to be aware of your surroundings. In the ghetto, in the projects, in those types of high-risk, high-violence parts of town, you always have to be aware, ’cause things could jump off at any moment. Like when I’m in the hood, I’m around these crazy motherfuckers. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m down with these motherfuckers, but it means I have to be aware what they’re doin’, ’cause if they’re fuckin’ around and I’m standing nearby, next thing you know my motherfucking head might get blown off by some motherfucker trying to get someone he got beef with.
So you grew up watching shit. You always had to be aware. You had the bullies to watch out for. You always had to be on point. And to this day it’s like that for a black man living in a poverty-stricken area. It ain’t the fact that you’re involved in shit—’cause often you ain’t doin’ anything—it’s that you’re so confined and so closed off in an urban box, that you have to be aware of everyone and everything around you at all times.
What a lot of people really don’t understand is how growing up like that changes a person for the rest of their life. I’m changed right now. It fucked me up, and I’m never going to be the same. I don’t have any close friends. I can’t have friends from Park Hill no more. I can’t deal with those dudes. I can’t deal with certain shit on the streets. I can’t be around certain people. Why? Because now I’m slashed. I’m always mentally aware of certain situations that I wasn’t aware of before. So I had to cut a lot of that stuff out of my life.
*
Eventually we left Brooklyn for Staten Island, and ended up in Park Hill.
In the late 1970s, welfare housing on the Island was going for a good rate. It was a chance for my mother and Raekwon’s mother to move out of Brownsville, and at first Park Hill was nice. When we got there, it was a working-class neighborhood and still a community. There were buzzers on the lobby doors. There was grass behind the buildings. The school was right down the block.
I mean, I still grew up in the notorious Park Hill projects. But back when we first arrived, Park Hill and most of Clifton and even nearby Stapleton had all just undergone urban renewal. It was a predominantly black population, and the neighborhood still looked newish, so things didn’t seem so rough.
Park Hill is privately owned, but federally subsidized. That’s a bad combination, because the federal government guarantees the owners that the residents’ rent will be paid. That sounds good, but not if the rent still gets paid whether repairs are made and upkeep maintained or not.
Still, at first, it wasn’t too bad. It was still a housing complex and rugged, but you had a fifty-fifty chance of walking through or near it and not getting fucked with by the locals. But then things started getting broken, and they wouldn’t get fixed for months, and sometimes not at all. As a result of the owners’ neglect, Park Hill began getting worse and worse.
*
But I didn’t see all that at the time. In a lot of ways, I had experiences like a lot of regular American kids. And there was a lot that was different, too.
I was a latchkey kid from the age of six or seven, which meant I was home alone, with no parental supervision, every day. Mom gave me the apartment key so I could let myself in after school, and “YOU DON’T ANSWER THE DOOR OR THE PHONE FOR ANYBODY!”
I’d have a babysitter when my mother could afford it. But there were slim pickings for good babysitters, and I went through a lot of them.
I remember one of my babysitters. She was a good person who kept a clean house and cared for me. She would give me my lunch and make sure I did my homework. She had two daughters, and all three of them would babysit me at her apartment. But she was also a straight-up heroin addict.
One day I walked into the living room at their place, and saw her shooting heroin right on the couch. Her hands were all swollen with needle holes, but at the time I didn’t know what they were from. I can still see them now. Her boyfriend and a couple other folks I’d never seen before were there, too, all shooting that shit up.
You have to understand that my mother had no idea this was going on. She was busy working hard and going to school, trying to better our situation. So I just kept shit like that to myself.
And although that babysitter was a functioning drug addict, she was good to me. When I grew up, I never looked down on her. Plus, I didn’t even know what they were sticking in their arms at the time anyway. Years later, I realized they were just hard-core heroin addicts. And when I say “hard-core,” I mean hard-core.
I had another babysitter who was a little freaky. While she was babysitting me, she’d be playing with my penis. I never spoke up about it to anyone. I was too young to really know what was going on, but instinctually I knew she shouldn’t be doing it. Regardless, I liked it—it was the first awakening of my sexuality. And I liked her, so I’ll never reveal her name.
Growing up how we did, you’d think it was all hard times. We were too young to know we were “disadvantaged.” You sort of have a feeling something’s not right, but you’re a kid, so you adapt and learn how to have your fun anyway. And there were a lot of good times and funny memories to balance out the hard-core ones.
Like Big Titty Rose. Big Titty Rose had the first pair of titties I ever saw.
We’d gone up to my friend’s house to get some Kool-Aid, and there she was lying on the couch, butt-ass naked. She musta weighed about three hundred pounds. It was summertime and hot, so I guess she wasn’t trying to put any clothes on. I was so intimidated by these big-ass titties. She didn’t try to cover up or anything. She just lay there, changing the channel, with them big things hangin’ out. I was young, maybe around six or seven, so they looked even more huge. I was just in awe, I remember. They didn’t call her Big Titty Rose for no reason.
I might’ve been young, but there were still some girls that got me going. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and I had a huge crush on Kim Fields’s character, Tootie, from The Facts of Life. I noticed that the credits listed Tandem Production Company. So one day, I called Information to get the number of the company so I could speak to her directly. Even though I didn’t speak to Tootie, I got an autographed picture of Kim on roller skates. She had braces on. I was in love with that girl right there. I showed my little friends and they were like, “Get outta here! How’d you get that?”
Clearly, I was very determined from a very young age. When I wanted something, I was gonna do whatever I had to do to get it.
*
When we weren’t watching TV or running up and down the streets, my friends and I mostly hung out in the back of the projects. Behind our building were a few acres of undeveloped land with grass and trees and two ponds. One pond was medium-sized and the other was real big.
On one side of the big pond were the whites, and on the other side were the blacks. If you tried to go to the other sid
e, you’d get run out. This mob of white boys had motorbikes, and they tried to chase us back to the black side. They used to spray-paint KKK and all types of shit on the rocks to try and scare us off.
We mostly just stayed on our side of the pond. We’d be back there playing Huckleberry Finn and all types of shit. We used to catch catfish there. We’d make bike trails, dig for worms and salamanders. We’d hang rope from a tree and swing on it. We had our imagination and improvised back then. There was no Play-Station or Internet. Some of my friends didn’t even have a TV or a phone in their apartment. No air-conditioning in the summer, so you might as well be outside.
We used to make rafts out of tires and old mattresses, and go out in the middle of the pond with the fucking things. We used to play in this huge Dumpster in the back of the building. It was grimy, but it was ours. There were lots of things in it—Dumpster diving was a gold mine for kids back then. You had your sticks. You had your chalk. You had your bike ramps. All types of shit.
We’d build bikes from the scraps we’d find: you’d find a wheel over here, a pedal over there, handlebars somewhere else. Once you got all the pieces together, you had to get a chain. We used to pop the chain and take the little links off with a wrench so it fit whatever bike we were working on. Sometimes we’d pull the back tire back as far as it could go and still stay on, and make the chain fit that way. The seat wouldn’t match, the handlebars wouldn’t match, but you were out!
We had so much fun. I remember Jack the wino in the staircase, smelling like Night Train, and Sassy, the gospel lady who lived downstairs and used to yell at us out the window, calling us little devils and shit.
Even the pack of wild dogs roaming the neighborhoods couldn’t stop us from playing outside. Dudes would shoot dogs and leave their carcasses behind our building all the time. This was the late 1970s, and there was no real ASPCA, at least not in my hood. Sometimes the dogs would come after us while we were riding our bikes. But the weirdest shit was when two dogs got stuck together fucking on the street. Stuck together from butt cheek to butt cheek, and you’d have to throw a rock to separate them. Once they separated, one dog running one way and the second dog running the other way, the dog that had been doing the fucking, his dick would be bloodred. Strangest shit I ever saw in my life.
*
I didn’t stay on the Island every summer, either. Back then, we all had the Fresh Air Fund. It was part of growing up in New York City back in the day. Even Mike Tyson has mentioned the Fresh Air Fund.
There were two types of programs in the Fresh Air Fund. One was where you stayed with a family up in the mountains, and another was where you stayed in a bunch of bungalows, more like a summer camp. I went to the camp, up north in the mountains, for about two weeks. I didn’t want to go at first, crying and all, didn’t want to leave my peoples. But it was good to get off the streets, and when it came time to leave the camp, I didn’t even want to go home, I didn’t want to leave the peoples I knew there.
I was an overly aggressive kid and already fighting, so it kind of felt like being sent away to jail, even though it wasn’t anything like jail. I mean, you had four meals a day, you had a counselor watching over you, you had to make your bed every day, and there were inspections where you could win a prize for having the cleanest bunk. A lot of things that helped make us ready for the world, instilling some order into us.
But the craziest thing about camp is that’s where I first found out about fame. There I was, hanging with every type of kid from all five boroughs, about three hundred of us in this one camp area, and I was one of the most famous kids up there. The whole camp knew me. I started young with that fame shit. I wanted to be the man. At camp they called me Yoda, because I had big ears back then, and everybody didn’t call you by your name, they nicknamed you based on what you looked like.
I was one of the kids who my counselor looked on to keep the rest of the kids in check. He had a right-hand man—me—who was supposed to make sure that the kids wouldn’t act up, and if they did act up, they’d get punched in the face. Every time I went to camp, I was regulating. I knew I had to set my claim when I arrived, so boom, that was it.
Me and another kid named Monster, who grew up in Brooklyn, we hung out a lot. The counselors liked both of us because we kept the other kids in check. I was the right-hand man, and Monster was the left-hand man.
One time Monster and I were taking a shower, and you only have a certain amount of time before the next bunk comes in. But we were taking our time, just sitting there talking and shit, and we ended up taking a little bit too long, and the older kids came in. We still had soap on us. We were still sudsy.
Those older kids said, “Yo, you shorties gotta bounce so we can get in the showers.”
Now, Monster and me were already oily together; each of us had fought enough other kids to immediately overcome any hesitation to strike first and strike hard. I would punch your face in at the drop of a dime.
What I mean by oily is like, when you’re about to be aggressive on someone, that first punch is like an icebreaker. If you haven’t been in a fight for a long time, you might be hesitant to punch somebody in the face simply because you haven’t done it in a while. After you hit three people in the face, it starts to become second nature. By the time you hit the fifth or sixth person in the face, it becomes a reflex.
So by this time, we were already geared up for violence—we had absolutely no problem punching any kids who got out of line in the face.
We just looked at these older kids like, “You know who the fuck you talkin’ to?” Me and him end up going toe-to-toe with these motherfuckers in the showers, with our slippers on, covered in soap, just fucking these older kids up. By the time the counselors came in, all of us were all just covered in soap, and they’re like, “Yo, what’s goin’ on in here?” And the other kids were like, “Hey, we’re just trying to use the showers, just tryin’ to get cleaned up in here.”
Looking back on it now, I have to wonder what I was thinking back then. I was such a little, little man, I was insane. I was crazy.
So we got into a little rumble with those older kids, but after that, they respected us, no doubt. Whenever the whole camp would come together, they’d point to us and say, “There’s those two little dudes. Don’t fuck with those two, they’ll fuck you up.”
That was when I first found out that I liked that notoriety shit, I liked being known like that. We had heart. I had little to no parental guidance at the time, but I was still holding it down. It was around this time that I also realized I was able to stand up on my own, even as a little kid.
And that hasn’t changed.
2.
GROWING UP ON THE CRIME SIDE
Staten Island was an interesting place to grow up, because a lot of it was still rural in the 1970s, when we first moved there. It was a bit removed from the electricity of the city. There were some aspects of life that were a little different than your typical city experiences. And it was a step up from Brownsville, at least before the crack era.
People think Staten Island is a joke. Staten Island is no joke. One thing about the Island is that it’s a small town. Boroughs like Manhattan and Brooklyn are so big, I could pop someone and disappear like a fart in the wind. You couldn’t do that on the Island, it was just too small. If you got into a beef with somebody, sooner or later you were gonna see them again. You couldn’t run away from your problems. So you were gonna have to knuckle up, shoot, cut, stab, whatever—you had to make your claim. Either you were gonna get punked, or you were gonna do the punking. And that’s just how the Island is.
Around this time, everything was gang-related. Now, when I say gang I don’t mean that we all wore colors and went around shooting people and all that. At that time, people would just come together in a community and stick together. They all had something in common, same neighborhood, same school, whatever, and they would just come together. And that’s how we grew up.
In my neighborhood, there was a ga
ng called the Avenue Crew, older kids who used to bully us all the time. They were about fifteen or sixteen years old, and we were only about eight or nine years old. They’d come up behind us and say, “Look at you, you lil’ punk motherfucker,” and then run off. We became recreation for these motherfuckers. It was just like the Little Rascals. We were the little kids that got on their fucking nerves, and they got on our nerves. They would just fuck with us. I never sat up in the house and played by the window just looking outside, even though going outside meant risking getting beat up by the Avenue Crew.
Getting beat up was different from getting beat down. Beat down meant you got stomped out and obliterated. You were probably going to the hospital. Beat up just meant getting wedgies and your chest punched in, getting slapped around or karate-chopped in the neck. Aside from the wedgies and jumping us and giving us hard pops on the arm, and catching us with that classic “open chest,” holding both arms down while whaling on your chest, they used to really try to hurt us. Man, they used to fuck us up. Like, they enjoyed it so much they used to stalk us every day. They’d run down on us and lump our legs up and take our little money. They’d hold us down and punch our legs until we couldn’t walk.
After a run-in with them, we’d go up on the roof and throw gravel and rocks at them. Every roof in the Clifton and Park Hill projects was covered with a mess of loose gravel and small rocks, which made perfect throwing ammunition. Or we’d wait for them to get fresh wearing their best clothes or be shooting dice and we’d hit them with water balloons. But they’d always catch us later. We didn’t care, though. It was like guerrilla warfare. Strike and run, and take the beating like a man when you get caught.
RAW Page 2