“If I win, I’m takin’ those sneaks.” I said pointing down at his shiny new Adidas.
“You ain’t gonna win, punk!” he replied and as far as I was concerned that was as good as a handshake.
“Bet!” I said and began swinging hooks at his head as hard and fast as I could surprising myself by landing more than I missed. He tried to swing back, but his punches were smothered by the deluge of blows I was raining down on him. I started kicking at him too and pretty soon he was turning to run. I tackled him and threw him in a headlock.
“Now give up those sneaks or I’m gonna tear your head off!” I was jerking on his neck and dragging him around the street. He was crying and calling for his brother, but the older boys were once again holding Sid back.
“Your brother ain’t helping you, fool! Now take them sneaks off! I ain’t playin!”
He took them off and I took them home. When my mom asked me where I had gotten them from I told her some of the kids down the street had found them and since I was the only one small enough to fit them they let me have them for a dollar. Lying came as easily to me as fighting.
“And where did you get a dollar from?”
“Grandma gave it to me yesterday.”
“Well, I think you spent it well,” Grandma interrupted, peeking over her glasses at my little feet then back at the shoes I held in my hands. “Them old things you wearin’ now are ’bouts ta fall off your feet.”
My mom went back outside to finish emptying the truck before Grandma could start in on her about how dirty I always looked and how she had never let any of her children look that way.
I wore those Adidas, the first brand name sneakers I had ever owned, until my toes busted out the front and beat Sid with a stick when he tried to get them back from me.
— | — | —
Chapter 2
“Don’t you know… That it’s true… That for me… And for you… The World Is A Ghetto?”
—War, “The World Is A Ghetto”
««—»»
There was a war going on in our neighborhood. Every morning you could smell the burnt carbon and sulfur lingering in the air after a gun battle. It filled your nostrils as you rose to greet the day. No bacon and eggs. No morning paper. Instead you counted the bullet holes in the walls from stray shots to see how close you’d come to not waking up at all and checked your family members to make sure there wasn’t suddenly one less.
In school you could see that wide-eyed shock and nervous fidgeting of post traumatic stress disorder on kids as young as eight and nine who had already lost brothers, cousins, or even parents and grandparents to the war. Some of them were already soldiers themselves. I was insulated from most of it by over-protective parents and living the proper distance from the Avenue. My street was mostly quiet. I was one of only four kids on the block. The rest were all old people. There just wasn’t much gang activity among the geriatric set. But ours was just a small oasis in a desert of violence and crime. Even on the next block there were bodies dropping almost nightly as the hierarchy of criminal power resolved itself through gunfire.
Increased pressure from the government forced the Mafia out of the street-level drug business leaving other organized gangs to fight over the lucrative market which was suddenly wide open. The Jamaican drug posses came blasting through the neighborhood eager to take over the cocaine business, that the Italians had abandoned, from the local thugs, the so-called Junior Black Gangsta Lords. The results were drive-by shootings that left more innocents dead than the intended targets. Including children. Then there was Scratch, a white drug dealer from North Philadelphia who was starting to prop his dealers up in some of the open air drug markets up and down Germantown Avenue. He kept a low profile, but it was pretty well known that he was waiting to mop up after the war between the Jamaicans and the JBGL. He had used the same opportunistic approach in North Philadelphia and now he was the biggest dealer in that part of the city with a crew of nearly a thousand soldiers and dealers. He was the last thing G-town needed.
When the Jamaicans took over the JBGL Scratch started making his presence known more and more and the results were lots of dead Jamaicans. Scratch’s reputation was one of unbelievable violence. The reality of his activities on the street was worse than anything you’d ever heard in even the most brutal gangsta-rap song or over-the-top slasher movie. Scarface didn’t have shit on him. In G-town, he fit right in. Soon, his dealers were shoulder to shoulder with dealers from the JBGL competing for customers on the Ave.
Germantown Avenue separated a dungeonous slum of filth, poverty, and despair on the Eastside from the only slightly more tolerable ghetto on the West. Between the two lay a stretch of concrete wilderness that contained more bars and liquor stores per square inch than any zoning commissioner would allow anywhere but in a slum that was carefully planned to remain that way. Churches, fast food joints, bars, and liquor stores, and in front of each one prowled a drug dealer eager to capitalize off the hopelessness that each venue attracted.
“Oh, Jesus didn’t do it for you today, huh? You don’t want to wait for heaven do ya? You want something that’ll take you there right now? Well, I got just the thing.”
“Hey, big girl! What some fool dumped you so now you’re gonna binge on fried chicken to forget him? All that’s gonna do is make you so fat you’ll never be able to get another man. Here, this’ll help you forget him and lose a few pounds too. Smoke on this for a while and soon you won’t be thinkin’ about that man or that chicken,” a dealer named Yellow Dog hollered as he hung out the passenger side window of a blood-red BMW that looked as if it had been caught in a jewelry store explosion.
Scratch didn’t just hire drug dealers he hired drug pushers. Everyone who worked for him was a salesman for the product. And they were all killers. Yellow Dog was the worst of them. He was second in command, if there was such a thing, and was as dangerous as a hyena. He was so light-skinned that he almost looked white himself except for his wide nose and thick lips.
The red BMW cruised slowly up the Ave with Scratch behind the wheel and Yellow Dog leering out the window at the crackwhores prancing and preening for all the dealers and customers alike that glutted the overpopulated street. It looked like some type of festival was going on, “Crack Head Day” or some shit.
“You said you wanted a pregnant one right?” Yellow Dog asked with his eyes still hunting through the parade of drug ravaged flesh.
“Yeah, one that’s just about to pop.” Scratch replied. His eyes radiated more hatred than lust, but Yellow Dog seemed oblivious.
“That’s some sick shit, bro. But I know a lot of guys who like them knocked up whores. They say the pussy’s wetter and their titties are all fat and swollen. I knew a cat who liked to drink milk from them pregnant bitches’ titties. He said it tasted like cream. He got his girl knocked up and tried to drink that bitch dry. After the baby was born he would be nursing right alongside the little rugrat.”
“That’s not what I want the bitch for.” Scratch replied with his blue eyes still spitting icy flame and Yellow Dog fell silent.
“Hey, there’s a pregnant bitch right there but I don’t think she’s a whore though.”
“Is she buyin’ crack?”
“Yeah, I think she is.”
“Then she’s a fuckin’ whore! Go scoop her ass up.”
“Yeah, but I’ve seen that chick walking around with her head all wrapped up. I think she’s a Muslim or some shit.”
Scratch smiled wide so that his gold plated smile caught moonlight and beamed it back.
“Even better. Go get that bitch.”
Yellow Dog wasn’t really down with raping a Muslim woman, but he was even less enamored of the idea of having his head blown off by his murderous employer for disobeying orders. Scratch pulled to the curb and Yellow Dog slipped from the car. He hit the sidewalk right beside the Muslim woman and whispered into her ear.
“Aren’t you with the Nation, sister? What you doin’ up here b
uyin’ crack?”
Startled, the woman whirled around and found herself staring into the sleepy-eyed leer of the mulatto gangsta who grinned at her like he’d caught her with a dick in her mouth. She looked at him and then quickly dropped her eyes to her feet.
“I-I-I have a problem.” She stammered as she tried to walk around him and avoid his accusatory eyes.
“Well, then let me help you, sista.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I know that it wouldn’t do for anyone else to see you up here on the Ave. Why don’t you hop in my ride and let me get you out of here. Then I’ll get you fixed up proper.” Yellow Dog opened his hand to reveal the four vials of crack rolling around in his palm and her eyes were instantly drawn to them. She didn’t hear a word he said after that. Nothing else mattered. She would have followed him anywhere for the promise of the pipe. Her addiction was strong. Obviously Allah had not been enough to tame it.
Yellow Dog walked with her to the Beemer and opened the passenger door with a flourish. When she looked in and saw Scratch behind the wheel she turned to Yellow Dog with rage and disgust twisting her face into a vicious snarl.
“You didn’t say anything about riding with no devils!”
“All White people aren’t devils, young lady…” Scratch pulled his big shiny nickel plated .45 and pointed it right at the woman’s belly. His eyes gleamed with a feral lust that ignited the icy irises like lanterns. “…Just me. Now get the fuck in this car and let me show you some of this here tricknology.”
He grinned wider as Yellow Dog covered her mouth to prevent her from screaming and shoved her into the car.
“Allow me to introduce myself, sista. My name is Scratch and I’m the trickster your minister warned you about.”
— | — | —
Chapter 3
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victim he intends to eat until he eats them.”
—Samuel Butler
««—»»
After living in that neighborhood for several months and mostly playing by myself I somehow managed to make friends with a few kids. Nikky and his big brother Warlock were my first real road dogs in the neighborhood. Warlock was a sixteen year-old drug dealer, graffiti artist, and wannabe pimp. He wore Cross Colors sweat suits, and gold chains so thick they looked like slave restraints. His hair was cut into a gravity-defying block taper that stuck up more than a foot from his head.
Warlock was a lethal looking street snake with eyes that were perpetually narrowed in suspicion and yellowed from blunt smoke. He was skinny as a rail and knee-high to a sewer rat, but he was known to be quick as death with a switchblade. With a knife in his hand Warlock would take on men twice his size. He was like a magician whose stainless steel prestidigitation could leave a brother cut from his ass crack to his nut sack in the silence between heartbeats. Warlock had much respect around the way. His brother Nikky was comparatively square.
Nikky was a shy kid who spent all his time drawing, daydreaming, reading comic books, and writing graffiti. Still, he got respect for his lyrical skills. Nikky was an aspiring hip-hop artist who could spin rhymes off the top of his head without missing a beat even though he often stuttered just trying to say hello.
He never wrote any of his rhymes down, but I suspected that during the long minutes he spent daydreaming he was really composing the complex lyrics that were his trademark. He could hold an entire crowd of teenagers enthralled as he stood on the corner spittin’ his gift like a ghetto griot, telling the stories of our lives.
Nikky was thicker than his brother and average height for an eight year-old. His hair was cut conservatively short with rippling waves and tapered on the sides. Both he and his brother were the color of polished oak but where Nikky’s skin was smooth and unblemished, Warlock’s face was a minefield of scars and pock marks and his teeth were covered with braces that looked like a mouthful of barbed wire. Somehow Warlock managed to make that metallic grin look cool. I even asked my mother if I could get braces just to look like him. Unfortunately my teeth were completely straight.
The day I first met the two brothers they were propped up against Warlock’s powder blue 1988 Lincoln Continental blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” as loud as his over-priced stereo system could crank and arguing with another kid Warlock’s age about who could rap better him or Nikky. Warlock was pimpin’ a pair of baggy Turkish pants in that MC Hammer style and an oversized polka dot dress shirt. He wore a furry red Kangol cap on his head and snake skin Stacey Adams. Nikky was dressed more conservatively in a pair of baggy Jive pants that hung low on his hips so that his red and white polka dot Calvin Klein boxers were visible and a T-shirt his brother had airbrushed in wild style graffiti letters that spelled out G-town. I stared at their clothing practically drooling with envy. If it wasn’t for the fact that Nikky looked so self-conscious and uncomfortable in his clothes I would have hated him instantly. I hated anyone rich and anyone coming on my block wearing a pair of $60 Jive jeans while I wore my $19.99 J.C. Penny’s Tough Skins would have been a hated enemy. But there was something about this kid. Even Warlock still looked like a street kid who’d found his fairy godmother and had been blessed for a time with princely garb. There was a fear in his eyes, just below the surface, that all of this wouldn’t last. That tomorrow the car, the stereo, the clothes might all be gone and he’d be right back in the projects choking on filth.
The kid that stood between them was an obvious hanger on. One of those who believed coolness could be passed through osmosis. He wore a greasy do-rag beneath which his naps were baking in an S-curl pomade. His fake Gucci sweatshirt was stained with the stuff. His name was Devin but he preferred to be called “Divinity”. When I walked up they had just started to battle.
“Well, who’s gonna judge this thing? It can’t be you. You’re his brother. Of course you’re gonna say he won.”
Warlock looked around and spotted me kicking a rock across the street looking bored and pretending not to be listening to their conversation.
“Yo! Kid! Come here for a sec!”
I walked over, fighting to keep the grin off my face.
“What’s up, dog?”
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Malik.”
“Well, my name is Warlock. This is my brother Nikky, and this fool here is Devin.”
“Divinity,” he interrupted offering his hand, which I shook without taking my eyes off Warlock.
“Whatever. Anyway, we’re about to have a little battle right here and we want you to be our unbiased judge.”
“I really don’t know that much about rap.”
“You know what you like and what you don’t. That’s good enough.”
“Alright, Devin, you go first.”
“Ay little homie. Can you do a beat box?”
“A what?”
“Nigga stop stallin’ and start flowin’!” Warlock growled.
Warlock started off with some old school tongue twister shit that sounded like a rip-off of Kangol from U.T.F.O. mixed with 2 Live Crew.
“Well, I’m Divinity—In the place to be—I put the girls in ecstasy—every time they see me—rip the microphone like a pair of lace panties—make the girlies scream like I’m all up in their pussy…”
His rap went on and on with that typical B-boy macho misogynistic bravado. Some of it was pretty funny, but none of it was very good. Then Nikky began to flow and what was coming out of his mouth was like nothing I’d ever heard. He was kicking straight poetry.
“Look long and hard—see the heavens scarred—by the impotent tears of a race torn apart— by a prejudice world and our misguided rage—attacking the puppets on a cardboard stage—Now we’re stuck in the gloom of our ghetto tomb—and even love to us is just the herald of doom—Who can I trust in this world of fear? What is beauty to the eyes that shed no tears?”
“Yeah, muthafucka! That’s what I’m talkin’ about, nigga!”
; This was the type of genius black folks never got credit for. This kid was probably failing English class yet he could write rhymes with themes, imagery, and rhythms more complex and profound than 99% of the garbage they were teaching us in school. Walt Whitman could kiss my black ass! This was true poetry!
“Man, that wasn’t no rap! I-I don’t know what the fuck that was!” Devin thought for a second and then shook Nikky’s hand, “Yo, but that shit was dope, bro. You gots mad skills!”
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