by Moshe Kasher
I could feel my life sinking in the quicksand, I just couldn’t see with clear eyes the reason why. I was absolutely convinced that every time I was about to get pulled out of the pit, some adult would come by and push me back down. I was surrounded by teams of people who claimed to have been commissioned to help me, but all they seemed to do was send me places that made me feel more broken and ruined than the last. All they ever did was lock my windows and lock my life. All they ever did was remind me what a fucked-up piece of shit I was.
My friends, terrible though they were, never suggested that I was worse than them. Only that we were all bad together. And that’s why we stuck close. Thick as thieves we were. Wait, we were thieves.
It wasn’t just stores and parents that we stole from either. The core of my friends had been corroded. Somehow, as the years went by, the hustling got to the point of us betraying one another. And no one seemed to care. We all changed. Everybody was hungry. I guess we had graduated into being real drug addicts. I began stealing from my friends, and they started stealing from me, too. No one was safe. Especially not kids from Piedmont.
With the Oakland Public School System breathing down all of our necks and OPD constantly harassing us, DJ and his brother Corey managed to switch to a fancy public school in a city called Piedmont by using a fake address to switch districts. I was super-jealous. Oakland Public Schools had already marked me with so many huge red flags that my record looked like it was a Chinese Olympics opening ceremony. Anyone even considering a district transfer would take one look at my record and drop it instantly, badly burned by the secrets sizzling inside.
Piedmont was a town adjacent to Oakland but, in truth, a world away. Piedmont has an odd history of having created itself as a sort of citadel of white flight. With the black writing on the wall in Oakland, a group of rich white people, rather than being chased across the tunnel, created a sort of fortified imaginary suburb. There are no logical borders to the town of Piedmont; it is literally surrounded on all sides by Oakland. The only barriers are psychological and socioeconomic.
Corey and DJ entered that school with instant street stripes just by virtue of being from Oakland. They went from White Boys at Claremont to Those Guys from Oakland at Piedmont. Instant status.
They quickly found themselves courted by the guys for protection and the girls for attention.
DJ and Corey would, intermittently, bring new friends into our social circle with the express plan of softening them up to the point of being able to rob them. It was like a group of foxes bringing a new, fat chicken into the den and trying to convince them they were safe.
“Hey, thanks so much for coming, the other foxes and I are really glad you are here.”
Chicken looks up, wanting so bad to be accepted, eyes darting back and forth. “Why are you licking your lips?”
Fox thinks quick. “Oh, that? That’s nothing, I have problems with dry mouth.”
Chicken wants to believe, does. “Oh, yeah, I know how that can be, I was just afraid you might be about to pounce on me and eat me.”
Fox tries to look shocked. “What?!? Me? What would make you think a thing like that?”
“Well… you’re a fox. And there are feathers everywhere. And you have buckets of KFC littered around the den. And there’s your raging fox boner.”
Fox looks down, his red face turning redder.
“How embarrassing,” says Fox just before he pounces.
Rich kids would be brought to us one by one, smiling that they’d been let in on a slummy secret. They would hang out for a few days, just long enough to feel comfortable, and then someone would set a trap.
“You need to buy a gat?” Donny leaned into a new mark from Piedmont, who sat there looking stupid with an upturned hat brim trying to look hard like Eazy-E but actually just looking like a punk-ass bitch.
“What’s a gat?” Pudge Face asked.
We all laughed. It was calculated. A laugh designed to say, “You don’t know this? You should!”
“A gat is a gun, you idiot,” I shot at the kid, feeling powerful, happy that it wasn’t me that was being called names.
“Oh! I don’t know, I mean, yeah, I need a gun for sure.” The kid was clawing, begging for approval. What would he need a gun for? To defend his mansion from the invading Mongol hordes? What he needed was for us to think he was cool. We knew it and we used it.
Donny passed him a joint and said, “I knew you were down! I told everyone you looked too hard to be from Piedmont.”
The kid beamed, pride shooting from his eyes. “Yeah, I hate that place.”
You see, in the Bay Area, bastion of the social equality movement, wealth was something to be ashamed of. There were no Upper East Side rich kids avoiding slumming it with the kids from the Bronx or Harlem, like in New York.
Rich kids in the Bay hid their wealth, excused it, and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. They tried to act poor, imagining poverty bestowed depth of character and extremity of experience. But what it actually provided was a disdain for bitch-ass rich kids.
“I’m getting a shipment from my man next week, and I can get you a twenty-two for like six hundred bucks.” Donny might as well have been drooling.
“Sick! I’ll have the money for sure.” We all smiled at each other.
The poor kid.
The following Tuesday, Donny and DJ pulled up with Joey to meet that kid. A box containing a cast-iron dumbbell was sold for six hundred dollars to a flesh-and-blood dumbbell. The deed was done, everyone got paid. I had nothing to do with it.
A week later I was riding my bike home when a BMW screeched to a stop alongside me and six rugby player–looking kids jumped out and surrounded me.
“Where’s our fucking money, bro!?!” a team captain type yelled at me, furious. I was amused.
“Oh, you got jacked? Yeah, well, that can happen, welcome to Oakland.” I grinned.
They didn’t think it was so funny.
All of a sudden, I felt a heavy blunt shock and I woke up on the ground, in the dirt, with kids kicking me. Aww fuck.
Not the fearless gangsters they wanted to be, they didn’t beat me up much, just enough to send a message. I got up screaming.
“You sucker-ass bitches! I didn’t take your fucking money, you stupid Piedmont bitches. Coward-ass hoes. I’d box any one of you one on one but you guys had to jump me? You fucked up now! There’s gonna be a bullet in each of your fucking heads for putting your hands on me!”
A note on the bullets.
I didn’t have a gun or bullets. But I was always threatening people with imaginary guns. Yelling things like, “I’ll be right back with a posse!” Like a cowboy movie. “Wait right here, motherfuckers!”
Then I’d run off, presumably to go retrieve my many guns and return with them a-blazing, but really what I’d do is leave the scene altogether and hope they ran in fear.
Unfortunately my position in the dirt, bloody and screaming, didn’t really strike fear in the hearts of these rich pricks.
But it did start a little mini war.
Joey freaked when he heard the news. We all thought we were beyond reproach. We had assumed that we could continue to rob kids from Piedmont with impunity and their fear of the Oakland in us should have kept them from retaliating. The realization that it wasn’t true was taken as a personal insult to Joey and the others. Jamie freaked, too.
“They betrayed us!” he screamed, his voice quaking with such emotion that it made us all uncomfortable.
“Actually, we betrayed them. I’m pretty sure that’s why they kicked my ass.” I was bruised up, but my snarky commentary would not be stopped.
“There are rules! The code of the streets has been broken and someone must pay. I’m calling my uncle.” Jamie looked close to tears.
We all rolled our eyes.
Joey called one of the kids who had jumped me and, with fire in his voice, explained how things worked around here.
“You ever fucking touch another kid fro
m Oakland again and you’ll wake up with your fucking house on fire, you got that shit, you fucking faggots?”
Joey yelled for a few more minutes and then handed the phone to me.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry we jumped you,” a frightened voice bleated.
“Go fuck yourself.” I slammed the phone down.
Mediation, Oakland style.
After that it was essentially open season on Piedmont kids. We would drive around the streets of Piedmont at night, looking for prey.
One night we were riding, about ten-deep, in a kid named Dave Hansen’s Chevy Suburban. Dave was a bizarre cat with a Piedmont address, but we let him hang out because he drove a Suburban, a vehicle that could fit an entire army of fuckups. Dave, after hanging out with us for just a couple of months, started screaming, “North Oakland for life!” when he got too drunk.
We considered kicking his ass every time, but just as we made moves to, someone would point at that sweet people mover and our rage would leak out of us.
It was late and we were driving through the hills of Piedmont passing a plastic gallon jug of Popov Vodka around the truck. Popov Vodka is so cheap there are potato chunks and miniature Russian peasants floating in it. But it does the trick.
From the corner of my eye as we passed a dark hill, I saw three guys walking, unaware that they were about to have the worst night in their recent memories.
“Guys, shut up and turn left. It’s time to hit a lick.”
We pulled up to the left and all ten of us jumped out of the car and hid in a long hedge, seemingly built for hiding a group of wayward youth.
I could hear the kids laughing and enjoying their night. They sauntered by, getting closer. They passed the hedge, they walked too far. Bad timing, kids.
As if with one brain, we all jumped out of our hedge screaming, “Break yourself!” “North Oakland Motherfuckers!” “Get these Motherfuckers!”
We pounced on those kids like a fuckin’ cat on some mice. Like a fuckin’ fox on some chickens. Like us on them. Their eyes went wide like plates. One kid took a look at us and bolted, full speed away, up the hill. Smart.
The other kids? Not so lucky.
Dave Hansen rushed them, fists swinging. As he punched the kid, I noticed he made, like, some kind of karate chop noise as he hit him, as if we were playing kung fu. Boom! Biff! Pow! What a loser.
The two kids fell to the concrete hard. One of them scrambled to his feet and we kicked him down again. This time he looked up at us, tears falling from his eyes, shame all over him. He screamed, “What do you want from me?” Poor kid.
“Your fucking wallet!” I screamed, excited at this turn of the karmic wheel.
You punch me, I rob you. The fact that these kids had literally nothing to do with my little situation meant little to me. I had power again.
We jumped back into the car screaming, our hearts pumping with adrenaline. We counted our spoils. Ugh. Eight dollars. Not enough to give us each a dollar.
“Fuck those fucking white boys,” Donny barked, pissed.
“Wait, aren’t we white boys?” I tried to inject my patented levity into the situation.
“Shut the fuck up, dude.” Donny didn’t seem as keen on the redemptive aspects of the robbery as I.
Well, whatever, we still had enough for another gallon of Popov. We rode the Suburban to one of the only liquor stores we knew of that would sell to a group of underage banditos, a little spot on Park Avenue in East Oakland.
East Oakland was and is like a lawless refugee camp after dark. A scary, dangerous place to visit, buck wild and terrifying.
We stopped in and spent that last eight dollars between the ten of us and got some more potato soup firewater.
For some strange reason, we then walked out of the liquor store one by one in a kind of procession as some of us grazed the aisles for Twinkies to steal (still fat!) and some of us just hurried back to the car.
As I exited the store, I noticed immediately that something was off. Donny and Corey were talking to a tall black dude and then disappeared past the side of the store. The dude approached me next. Calmly, he raised his T-shirt to reveal a .32 stuffed in his pants. He leaned in and whispered to me, “Go around the corner and lay down on the ground.”
No argument from me.
I rounded the corner to see all my friends, lying prone on the sidewalk with their hands behind their heads. I’d seen this so many times with Officer Joe that, for a second, I entertained the illogical idea that we were being busted by the police. The police that looked like forty-year-old thugs from East Oakland and carried their police-issued pistols in their underwear.
Right, that didn’t make sense. We were getting jacked. We lay down on the sidewalk in a line behind a Cadillac Coupe de Ville that was double-parked in the street. It created a kind of privacy curtain between us and anybody that might have driven by and, seeing a bunch of white kids in East Oakland lying on the ground, called the police and ruined everything for these guys.
I looked at them from the corner of my eye. Old. They were old guys, too old for pathetic jack moves like this one. Forty-year-old guys who rob fifteen-year-old kids for their pocket money have made some serious bad investments on the criminal retirement plan. I almost felt bad for them.
“All y’all empty your fuckin’ pockets.” I’d heard this kind of thing before. Oh yeah, twenty minutes earlier when I was yelling it. It sounded so much more convincing from an actual black person.
We complied.
All of us in the line emptied our pockets.
The loot was pathetic. We didn’t even have the eight dollars.
We gathered a pile of scraps for these, the real wolves, to devour. It was a sad sight. A half a pack of Hav-A-Tampa cigars, a pack of Newports, a dollar fifty in quarters, house keys, and a book of matches. Ten white boys must’ve looked like the fuckin’ jackpot to these guys. I’m sure they saw us and thought we were a bunch of suburban rich kids, fresh from the other side of the tunnel, our pockets fat with our parents’ money. Sadly we were just like them. Except twenty-five years younger. And slightly paler.
They collected the pile of slop with a grimace.
“Get the fuck up!” the gunslinger of the bunch yelled. We jumped up like Marines after a push-up drill.
We got the fuck up.
We stood there, scared but also a bit frustrated at the turn of the events.
Jamie leaned forward to our captors. “You know it’s funny, we rob people, too! I mean less tough kids than us obviously. I’m pretty impressed that you caught us slipping actually.”
“Shut. Up.” the short one with the gun snarled.
“Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.” Jamie tried to look cool as he nodded assent.
I took a step forward.
“Hey, um, guys? You have my house keys. They can’t be useful to you, would you mind throwing them back to me?” The other guys looked at me like I was insane, but what the fuck, I needed my house keys. If I lost my keys, I just straight up couldn’t get into my house. My mother’s absentmindedness had allowed the flashing light system that was wired into our doorbell to fall into disrepair years ago. Without the lights flashing, my mom had no way to know anyone was at the door. I’d stand outside of my door for hours just hoping my mom would look out the window for me. So I asked for my keys back.
The tall dude with the loot in his hands stared at me for a second and then tossed me the keys. I smiled at him, grateful.
“Thanks.”
People started asking for their shit back, and piece by piece we stole back the shit they’d stolen from us.
This was like a scene from a Laurel and Hardy robbery.
The tall guy, apparently sick of how pathetic we were and how pathetic we were making him feel, muttered, “Broke-ass motherfuckers,” and lunged at DJ, clipping him in the jaw, dropping him back to the sidewalk.
DJ screamed like a wounded child/wildebeest and collapsed. Inside I grinned a bit and thought, “Karma’s a bitch.”<
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The guys drove off and left us panting, hearts pounding on the sidewalk. Then Dave Hansen looked up and grinned. “Well, they didn’t get everything.” He pulled out the new bottle of vodka safely hidden in the deep pockets of his hoodie. We all smiled. Maybe this guy wasn’t so bad after all.
I guess after all that, we ended that evening at a moral zero.
We robbed, got robbed, and one of us even got punched in retaliation for the karmic punches we’d sprayed into the world. We didn’t realize it, but it was perfect. Or maybe we did realize it.
We piled back into the Suburban a bit lighter.
The engine spat to life and we were off, driving back to North Oakland, to home and safety. We rode in silence for a few minutes, breathing through what had just happened to us. I broke the silence.
“Hey, you guys wanna go rob somebody?”
The guys turned and looked at me. Donny cracked a smile.
DJ, holding his face, punched me in the arm and started laughing.
We all started laughing. The noise filled that truck. We laughed into the truck and we laughed into the air. We laughed like lost boys. Dave put on some Gangstarr, a track called “Soliloquy of Chaos.” A fitting soundtrack to the evening’s festivities. Someone produced half a joint, pulled from the ashtray of the Suburban. A smoke, a drink, and the whole debacle was puffed away. I curled in and fell asleep.