We started out robbing other kids of their cash, jewelry, clothes, and sneakers, we even rolled some fool for a can of Pepsi once. It wasn’t about the goods or the money. It was all about payback. We actually believed we were doing some good in some grand karmic way. We thought we were giving balance to the universe. It was about not allowing the middle-class to forget about those below the poverty level that they left behind imprisoned in economic dungeons, boiling in nihilistic rage and desperation as we waited out our life-sentence. Sometimes we didn’t even jack them for their money at all. We just beat them down on general principles.
The last time we went on one of these missions we succeeded only in chasing ever larger groups of white teenagers around. They were all too cowardly to fight even though in one case they outnumbered us nearly five to one with nine to our mere two. White boys weren’t like brothas around the way. They didn’t have the same manhood issues we did or if so they certainly managed to handle it better. In the hood you don’t have much but your respect and most of us would kill or die for it. These kids had everything so losing a little face to a couple grimy-looking Black thugs meant little to them. They could always tell themselves that we probably had guns or that we were on PCP and they wouldn’t miss a moment of sleep over it. We thought they were all a bunch of candy-assed over-privileged pussies and every time they ran from us increased our anger. Tonight we weren’t about to be denied.
Huey and I left Yolanda’s house and walked down Green Street to Chelten Ave to catch the J-bus up to Frankford. We both had our gats on us, but we had no intention of using them unless we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by the Klan or something, which wasn’t likely. This wasn’t the South and we weren’t some passive, Jesus-whipped, handkerchief head niggas that would hide in the closet and pray while Klansmen burned the house down. If we ran into the KKK there would be a fuckin’ white sale in the hood that night.
After we got off the bus it started to rain so we walked quickly up Frankford Ave, afraid that the rain would chase any would-be victims in-doors before we could get to them. We walked up the street with no umbrella for nearly an hour with no luck. The streets were deserted. We were just about to give up and go home when we passed a Burger King and some fools yelled out, “Niggers!” It was the first time I could remember being so happy to hear that word.
This was what we had been waiting for. We didn’t know who had said it. We didn’t know how many there were or how big they were. We didn’t know if they had guns and knives or pitch forks and torches. We didn’t care.
We ran into the parking lot in back of the Burger King where about a dozen white kids stood, sat, and leaned on their cars. About eight of them were boys with another five girls with them. I was less pissed off that they had yelled nigger than by the fact that kids that young already had cars. I was sure that none of them had ever had to kill anyone to get it either.
They looked like wet alley dogs. Their stringy hair was plastered to their faces and dripping with rain. Even through the rain I could smell their fear. For not the first time or the last it amazed me that these pale, anemic-looking creatures could have conquered and enslaved anyone, especially my proud Black race. Even the biggest one among them, who was clearly Tank’s equal in size, struck no fear in my heart. They just looked pathetic and pitiful in their faded Levis, wrinkled Heavy Metal T-shirts, and scuffed Doc Martins.
How could people with so much money dress so poorly? I wondered.
“Who tha fuck said that?” I growled.
The girls looked genuinely frightened. They were expecting a serious brawl to break out. Obviously, they knew their own people less than we did. These weren’t poor crackers from Fish Town, or crazy Irish sons of bitches or Italians from South Philly. Those bastards were just as hard as we were. These were rich WASP kids, or at least middleclass, which, in our eyes, made them rich. They didn’t know shit about the street. They didn’t have to. They were insulated by their money and their little middleclass neighborhoods. The only thing they knew about violence was what they heard in rap songs and watched in movies. They weren’t going to fight when there was a chance they could run or talk their way out of it. If one of them spoke up none of his boys would back him up and they all knew it. They’d just stand there petrified while the two of us beat one of their homeboys half to death.
No one said a word as we stalked in between them glaring at each one of them. Huey was in a rage to hurt someone, not for what they had yelled but for a thousand other offences they had indirectly committed against him. He wanted to kick someone’s ass for the sins of the entire White race. He grabbed the biggest muthafucker among them, just ’cause he looked like he was thinking about challenging us, and began to beat him like he owned him.
“You said that shit didn’t you? DIDN”T YOU? You white peckerwood muthafucker!”
Huey launched into him so viciously that three of his boys actually steeled their hearts to confront us, but I knocked one of them out cold with the butt of my nine millimeter and slowed their roll with the quickness.
“Don’t none of ya’ll bitches try to jump in that shit. Unless somebody wants to fess up and take the beating this big pussy’s takin’,” I looked from one face to the other. One by one they dropped their heads, “I didn’t think so. Ya’ll just gonna let your boy here take the ass-whippin for you, huh? Pussy ass muthafuckas,” I hissed.
They all backed up and just stood there watching. The big White boy that Huey was dealing with ran straight at him with his fists cocked back in what looked like some super-hero pose. The comic book stance left his midsection exposed to Huey’s devastating kicks and punches. The wind exploded from the big kid’s lungs and he doubled over grimacing in agony as Huey’s shin slammed into his ribcage with a sound like a baseball bat hitting a watermelon. He kept coming though. I’ll give him that. There were tears running down his cheeks from the pain, frustration, and humiliation. He tried to close the gap and grapple with Huey, but no way was Huey going to let this big cracker get his meaty paws on him. The guy took so many blows trying to get a grip on Huey that by the time he grabbed hold he was too weak to do shit and Huey simply slung him to the ground. The guy fought hard though. Somehow he managed to get back up.
There were cuts above and beneath both of the white boy’s eyes, which were rapidly swelling shut. His lip was busted, his nose was broken, and he was holding his side where Huey had kicked him and I suspected that at least one rib was broken. Still, the guy managed to surprise me by actually landing a few solid punches on Huey this time as he lunged clumsily forward. Huey’s nose started bleeding profusely and soon his face was covered with it. I started to get worried when I saw Huey stagger a little after the last punch caught him right on the chin. The White boy’s friends cheered at this latest development and I was so angry it took everything I had to keep my finger from squeezing the trigger on the nine which was once again tucked away in my pocket. Then Huey grinned, with a mouthful of blood, and teeth turned a crimson hell. It was the most evil expression I had ever seen. Even the big cracker’s friends stopped cheering. They knew their friend was about to catch a bad one.
This time Huey charged. He grabbed the big kid by his hair and brought his knee down into the boy’s face repeatedly, his body a frenzied blur of savage motion until the kid slumped unconscious to the blacktop. Still, even after the white kid was unconscious, Huey continued to smash knees and elbows into the guy’s face in a blind rage. The kid’s skull began to lose shape as bone was pulverized.
“Huey! No! Stop! Stop! You’re going to kill him!”
Blood had started running from the White boy’s ears, nose and mouth, and he had started convulsing.
“We got to get out of here, bro!”
I snatched Huey off of him. The kid’s face was destroyed. It had lost all integrity and was little more than a bleeding pulp of hair and skin. It was the most gruesome sight I had ever witnessed. I barely pulled it together in time to run. I had frozen in anticipation, wa
iting to see if the kid’s brains would run out of his ears.
We took off back the way we had come and left the kid bleeding in the Burger King parking lot surrounded by his horrified friends who were too scared to even scream. They stared in mute shock and didn’t even see us leave. I was in shock too as we ran. I felt like I was in a dream.
He did it with his bare hands. He killed that kid with his bare hands!
There was no doubt in my mind that I had just witnessed a murder, a barbaric and senseless murder of incomprehensible savagery. No way could that kid have survived a beat down like that. If he did he would never be the same again.
My feet barely touched the ground as we ran. I was high on adrenaline and the smell of blood and fear— the spectacle of violence.
My God, what did we just do?
It wasn’t that I felt sorry for him or felt any guilt or remorse whatsoever. Fuck a white boy! What really had me trippin’ was the degree of hatred a person would have to have in their hearts to do that to someone with their bare hands. I could never imagine hating anyone like that unless I had loved them first or they had hurt someone I loved. To do that to a complete and absolute stranger who’d done nothing to me I’d have to be insane. I’d capped fools plenty of times, but this was hands on, it was intimate, passionate. Not the cold detachment of pulling a trigger. Shootin’ a fool you could almost imagine that it was the gun and not you that had killed him. But…this? The blood was literally on his hands. That type of hate completely defied my reason.
It occurred to me that Huey had problems that ran far deeper than anything anyone could see. There was something monstrous and cruel in him. Maybe we all had problems like that, deep down. Because, as monstrous and inhuman as Huey seemed to me right then, I had still killed three times as many people as he had in the last year alone. If Huey was a psychopath then what the fuck was my excuse?
We ran all the way back down to Frankford Ave. I trembled and paced back and forth looking over my shoulder for the police. If the bus didn’t come soon I was sure I would have lost my mind.
“Settle down, man! You look guilty as fuck.” Huey was laughing.
“I think you killed that White boy, playa.”
“If only the whole race had one neck, huh?”
“Nah, bro, I’m serious. That dude is deader than disco. That was some ill shit back there.”
Huey looked me up and down, sneering with contempt.
“Fool, I know damn well you ain’t cryin’ like some little bitch over no dead peckerwood? How you gonna be out there killin’ brotha’s all over the street for that devil you and Tank work for then start trippin’ when we finally do a devil who deserved to get done?”
I stared sheepishly at my feet, unable to face his accusatory eyes. I certainly didn’t feel any grief over that White boy’s death. I was just worried because of how the law looks at it. Cops didn’t trip when niggas capped niggas, least of all when it was drug related, but when two Black roughnecks beat a middleclass suburban kid to death in front of his friends in a good safe neighborhood like the Northeast, shit definitely hit the fan. Killing a White boy wasn’t no casual thing and I didn’t really appreciate being made an accessory to it without even being asked first. Still, true homies backed each other up right or wrong and I wasn’t about to desert my boy now. We’d been through too much shit together. Besides, I couldn’t really explain to Huey that my biggest reservations came from a fear that he was insane and the knowledge that to society any ten of the niggas I murdered in the streets didn’t compare to killing one White kid.
“I don’t know, man. That shit was just a little deep.”
“Naw, brotha. That shit you do is deep. You out there killin’ your own fuckin’ people at the whim of some power crazy white devil. That shit is deep. What I just threw down was revolutionary! That was taken out reparations on a devil’s ass!”
Huey was standing up and glaring at me with his face contorted into some bizarre combination of a snarl and a grin. Spittle flew from his lips as he barked out his words. The bus had pulled up now and people were exiting and staring at us as Huey raged and roared. I pulled Huey close and whispered to him trying to calm him down.
“Yo, nigga, chill! You tryin’ to get us arrested? Let’s get on this bus and get the fuck out of here before the cops roll up.”
“I ain’t your goddamned nigga!” Huey shouted backing away from me and shrugging my arm off his shoulder, “If that’s what you wanna be then you can call yourself that, but I got better things to do than be a nigga all my life.”
Huey’s eyes beamed hate and shined with an almost religious fervor as he spoke. I was still glancing over my shoulder looking nervous and scared. Huey hissed and rolled his eyes in disgust. He turned his back on me and walked onto the bus.
I walked behind him and sat down next to him staring out the window. I felt foolish. I knew I had just lost much of Huey’s valued respect. He didn’t look at me for the rest of the ride. Instead he stared at every white face on the bus challenging them with his eyes, daring them to return his contemptuous glare as if everyone of them had done him some personal wrong.
If only the whole race had one neck.
He had meant it. There was no doubt that he would murder every Caucasian in existence were it possible, including the half that was inside of him. That much hate just couldn’t be healthy.
Huey’s message would have affected me a little deeper if it wasn’t for the fact that he was such a cold-hearted killer himself. Even though he cried and poured out a little liquor for every brotha he killed it still seemed to me like the pot calling the kettle black. If he’d never killed another Black man and had only killed White people I might have bought his revolutionary stance, but I knew that the kid he’d pummeled back there was the first White person he’d ever done, but it wasn’t his first homicide. Still, my conscience was ringing and I couldn’t wait to numb it into silence with a couple of Colt 45s, a fat ass blunt and some of Yolanda’s talented head. I couldn’t wait to get away from Huey. It would be a long time before he and I kicked it again.
««—»»
The flames crawled down the Marijuana filled cigar, eating it slowly away as I sucked its senses-dampening vapors down into my lungs and tried to forget about my life. Yolanda wasn’t home so I had hooked up with Tank. I passed the forty to him and he tilted it up like it was Gatorade and he’d just finished a marathon.
Tank and I sat down in the playground of Lingelbach Elementary School where he and I had first met years ago. We didn’t speak, instead we indulged in that timeless male ritual sucking our emotions down into a dense fog of inebriation, down into the dark emotional chasm where every pain we’d ever endured festered. It was a reservoir that was far from infinite and would need to be emptied soon before it erupted violently outward. The cold bitter taste of the beer washed over my tongue and scrubbed away the faces of the vengeful dead. When the blunt was passed back to me I sucked it down to a roach. I was as high as I could get, but it wasn’t enough. I still couldn’t shake the depression I was in. Even Tank was looking uncharacteristically melancholy. Without any warning at all tears sprang to my eyes and spilled down my cheeks.
I cracked open another forty and plugged it into my mouth trying to silence the sobs before they began. I nearly drowned myself as my sorrow took hold of me full force and shook me like a broken toy. Beer sprayed everywhere as I choked on my own grief. I hurled the bottle at the swings a few yards away and felt a little better somehow to hear it shatter.
“Hey, bro? Are you alright?”
“What tha fuck is we doin’, Tank? What tha fuck is we doin’?” The tears were flowing freely and my chest heaved with sobs. I wanted to destroy whatever it was that was making me hurt so bad. My hands balled into tight fists and my forearms bulged. I wanted to find the pain and beat it down the way Huey had beaten down that White kid. But it was deep inside of me where I couldn’t get to it.
“How tha fuck did we turn into monsters, Ta
nk? We were kids! Just a bunch of fucking kids! How did we get this way? We’re murderers, man! We’re fucking monsters!”
Tank looked at me and for once that cynical look of amused disinterest had left his face. There was none of the boredom and apathy that had seemed to be carved into his features, a congenital characteristic as much a part of him as his blue-black skin. Now, incredibly, his face showed compassion and understanding. It was obvious that he would have rather not ever have had this conversation and was conceding to it only because he sensed I needed it. He sighed deeply and looked up at the darkening sky. Then he took another swig of malt liquor and one more hit off the blunt. When he spoke his voice was slow and measured, heavy with emotion.
“Remember how poor we were when we first started doing this? Remember how things changed for us after we met Scratch? Like, things got better from day one. I mean, right after we did Meech, remember how proud you were to go to school in all those new clothes and not be laughed at for once? We finally felt like we were regular kids and not just some dirty little poor kid from the ghetto? Remember that feeling, Snap? I felt like somebody for the first time when we walked into school and all the kids were jockin’ our new gear. It was like my first shot of pussy it felt so good. Even the females were given me a little respect for once. Even our teachers looked at us differently. Don’t even front like you don’t remember how they used to look at us with disgust and pity. Most of the time they just ignored us completely like they just figured that stupidity and poverty went hand and hand. I wouldn’t have dared raise my hand back then because I never wanted to call attention to myself. But I didn’t even sweat walkin’ up to the blackboard to solve a problem when I was sportin’ Jive and Cross Colors. I’d have never done that in a pair of raggedy ass hand-me-downs because if anyone had laughed at me I’d have had to kill them. Those clothes, that money, it changed our lives man. I would have killed anyone, even you, to keep that feeling. But now man, sometimes I’d give anything to be that poor dirty little fat kid again. You think you the only nigga with a conscience? Shit, I still think about what we did to Meech. You blew his ass away right at my feet.”
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