Yaccub's Curse

by Wrath James White

  I saw one of the pills slowly making its way into my mother’s mouth as he brutally pried her jaws apart and my vision narrowed until it was like I was watching the whole thing through a keyhole. Slowly the light began to fade and I felt my body go limp. I was losing consciousness. I felt small hands slip the blade from my hands just before my head hit the carpet. I wanted to see who the hands belonged to, but even as I fell my eyes would not leave my mother and my periphery vision was gone.

  Those tiny hands entered my miniscule field of vision in slow motion. Tiny light brown hands raising a knife high into the air above a tiny light brown head with curly brown hair. The hands rose and fell and rose and fell. Each time they rose a wave of liquid red followed the blade in an arc that flew from the metal and spattered the walls. The hands rose and fell again and again until they were no longer golden brown. Until they were the blackest red I had ever seen, slick and shiny like crimson oil.

  Just before my mind shut down completely I thought to myself, “Huey was right. All men are good for is destroying things and hurting people. Even us.”

  Then I dreamt, of concentration camps and jungles set ablaze with napalm. Darryl was burning in my dream. He was burning alive in the jungle. I saw him die twice that night.

  The cops thought I had killed Darryl, but there was no evidence linking me to the crime and we never told them about Huey being there that night. They knew about the beatings so, when they ran into a dead end in their investigation, they just figured Darryl had gotten what he deserved and closed the book.

  I tried to confess to the murder, but so much evidence pointed away from me, including my mom’s own testimony that someone else had broken in and stabbed him to death, that no one believed me and those who did couldn’t prove it. The cops looked down at me like I was stupid and pitiful and when they spoke to me it was in patronizing voices that they probably thought were soothing.

  “I’m sorry kid, but if you had killed your dad you’d have blood all over you. I know you probably wanted to kill him though. I know if I was you I would have wanted to.”

  I cried. I wept so long and so loud that I started having an asthma attack. I didn’t even know I had asthma until then. As much as I wanted to accept the blame for ending Darryl’s life it was denied me. Deep down I resented Huey for taking that away from me. I was grateful to him for saving my mother’s life and ending her misery, but I hated him for denying me the chance to kill the bastard myself. Yet, somehow, Darryl’s murder still drew us all closer. Secrets have a way of doing that sometimes. After that, more than ever, we were like brothers. And each year brought us even closer together. I wish now that they had never met me. They would have been better off and maybe Tank would still be alive.

  — | — | —

  Chapter 6

  “…The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.”

  —W.E.B.Du Boi, “The Souls of Black Folk”

  ««—»»

  1999. It was almost the end of summer and every kid I knew in that neighborhood was piled up on Huey’s porch, joking, bullshiting about bitches we’d never met, jumpshots we never really made, and fights that we never won, drinking Kool Aide, Colt 45, and passing around a bottle of MD 20/20 when Huey’s mom wasn’t looking.

  It seemed like the entire neighborhood turned fourteen that month one birthday party after the other. In our minds we were men now and it seemed like we should have had better things to do than sit around getting drunk, but I was at a loss as to what. I looked from face to face noticing the shadows of mustaches creeping beneath noses that just a year ago seemed to have been still dripping with snot. I listened to the deep bass that now replaced the child-like tenor that had been there before and I kept wondering what kind of orgy must have gone down the year I was conceived that had led to so many women getting pregnant around the same couple of weeks.

  Warlock was already blunted when he got there and the pungent musk of stale weed exuded from his pores in a great cloud that was giving us all a contact high. His homeboy Terrance was so fucked up he couldn’t even keep his eyes open. He sat in a corner on the floor grinning and nodding. Whatever he was on it was a hell of a lot stronger than weed.

  “Get this junky muthafucka off my porch ’fore my Mom comes out here and sees that nigga!” Huey said, but nobody moved a muscle to comply and Huey went back to tinkering with the VCR. Everybody was so used to Huey complaining that they had learned to ignore him. Half of us were drunk already anyway and probably didn’t look a whole lot better than Terrance did.

  Nikky held the bottle of MD under his T-shirt and constantly complained about its chill against his bare skin, but wouldn’t relinquish the bottle for anything. Everytime we passed it around he made sure it stopped at him before Huey’s mom came by. At fourteen years old he was an alcoholic in training.

  Tank had somehow talked Fat Greg into springing for a pizza and they were both on the phone yelling at the pizza man about a free soda that was supposed to come with the pizza. The Twins, Jerome and Tyrone, who looked like two young, underfed, Muhammed Ali’s, were hogging the only two deck chairs and complaining about the heat and the long walk to the video store.

  “Damn! It’s hotter than a muthafucka out here! I ain’t walking all the way back down to the Ave with ya’ll to take those videos back. That walk was long as fuck!”

  “Stop cryin’ like a little bitch!” Little Drew spoke up and just as fast Jerome reached over and smacked him on the back of the neck.

  Little Drew was the richest kid in the neighborhood mostly because he was the only kid we knew who still had both parents living together and two incomes coming in. He was an only child though and his parents practically paid us to hang out with him. When he was around us he liked to front like he was hard, but we all knew he was a mama’s boy. We always teased him that he should never commit a crime or else he’d wind up in prison with Kool-aide on his lips, washing drawls, braiding hair, and popping the zits on Bubba’s ass. We all knew that he would’ve rather gotten his asshole ripped open by a convict than take an honest ass-kicking. These days it was fools like him that you had to watch though. Nobody on earth was quicker to pull a trigger than a coward. He was supposed to be trying to help Huey hook up his mom’s VCR to Huey’s old black and white TV, but he kept butting into everyone’s conversation and getting abused for it.

  “Damn, dog! You ain’t have to smack me in my goddamned neck!”

  “Now who’s cryin’ like a little bitch?”

  “I should take my damned VCR back for that shit.”

  “You ain’t takin’ shit back. Now lift the TV so I can slip the VCR underneath it and stop being a little pussy before you get fucked,” Huey growled

  “That’s right. You play pussy you get fucked!” Warlock co-signed, laughing his ass off.

  Drew’s eyes misted over like he was about to cry as he looked around at us. He never knew when we were serious and when we were playin’ and he hated when we ganged up on him.

  “Lift that shit, dog!” Huey yelled again and Drew obediently picked up the little TV.

  We had planned to have a martial arts movie marathon and Drew’s mom had loaned us the VCR for the day as well as the money for the videos of course. Sometimes I think she’d have offered us some pussy to get Drew out from under her skirt for a few hours.

  I was sitting on the porch railing praying the weather-beaten, termite-eaten thing wouldn’t collapse under my weight and send me tumbling down into that nest of weeds between the house and the street that we occasionally called a garden when in optimistic moods. It creaked and groaned every time I laughed and I thought I heard faint cracking and popping sounds, but everything just seemed to strike me as funny that day. There were Tasty Cake wrappers all over the porch and Huey was doing his best not to flip out about it though he had already mentioned the mess twice in five minutes. For such a sinister little thug he was almost p
rissy when it came to keeping things neat.

  You could tell we were all from the same neighborhood at a glance. We all wore baggy shorts that hung down to our knees. Our boxer shorts stuck out the top as the shorts sagged well below our waistlines just barely covering our asses. We wore Nike, Adidas, or Reebok sneakers with matching tank-tops or t-shirts that were as oversized as our shorts. We all had baseball caps or sun visors spun backwards on our heads and of course we all wore dark sunglasses. Fat Greg was the only one wearing pants. That brother wouldn’t be caught dead in shorts; not with those overstuffed sausage-shaped legs of his.

  Jerome and Tyron had started capping on each other’s moms evidently oblivious to the fact that they both shared the same mother. I laughed so hard that I could feel the decrepit railing struggling to hold me.

  “Your mom’s so fat she had sex with two guys at the same time and they never even saw each other!”

  “Your mom’s so dirty that she eats dinner with no panties on to keep the flies off her food.”

  “Your mom’s so black that if you close your eyes you can see her better!”

  “Your mom’s pussy spits tobacco!”

  “Your mom’s pussy has whooping cough!”

  Those brothas were crazy! I laughed so hard I dropped a forty of O.E. I had been hiding under my shirt. See, we all drank Colt 45 around the way and to drink another brand was almost treason, but I liked the way it tasted. The bottle hit the floor and exploded, sending shards of glass shrapnel spiraling across the rotting porch and beer pouring off into the garden like a miniature waterfall. I nearly fell off the railing I was laughing so hard. I felt the wood splinter with a loud crack and I jumped from it as Huey cast an angry glance in my direction.

  “Man, clean that fucking beer up before my Mom comes out here and whoops all our asses!”

  I went into Huey’s house to get a broom and dustpan and Mrs. Turner shook her head when I came back in and dumped the shattered forty into the trashcan.

  “Ya’ll better not be making a mess out there. And I better not smell no weed out there either. Ya’ll shouldn’t even be drinkin’!”

  “Uh…we ain’t drinkin’. I mean…not really. Just a little beer.”

  “Boy, get your lyin’ ass out my kitchen ’fore I slap you right upside your head!”

  I held in my laugh as I ran back out onto the porch.

  “Your moms is a trip, dog.”

  “Why? Did she say something about us drinkin’?”

  “Dog, she ain’t even trippin’ off that. She just said we better not be smokin’ no weed out here.”

  “She probably smells this nigga.” Huey grumbled staring at Warlock.

  “Man, fuck you,” Warlock hissed.

  The pizza man showed up just as Huey and Drew finally got the VCR set up. Greg handed the man a twenty and retrieved the extra-large pizza. The delivery boy turned around and started to walk off and Greg’s face contorted into a rictus of exaggerated outrage.

  “Ay, dog! Da fuck is you goin’ with my change?”

  “That’s my tip.”

  “Nigga, I ain’t say shit about givin you no tip!”

  “I know you ain’t gonna have me come all the way up here and not give a brotha no tip?”

  “Dog, don’t be tryin’a play me like no sucker! What I look like some kind of fool to you?”

  “Man, I ain’t tryin’a play you. I’m just tryin’ to get paid like everybody else.”

  Greg was the type of brother who thought everyone was trying to get over on him and laughing at him behind his back. His self-esteem was so low that he even thought the retarded kids at school looked down on him. I guess it had something do with being overweight. He was all attitude and appetite. Greg wasn’t just large and solid like Tank. Tank could run a five minute mile even with all his bulk. Greg started breathing hard lifting his fat ass off the couch. He was all out of proportion. Short, with a huge stomach, plump stubby legs, arms that hung with cellulite like an old woman’s, and big saggy man-breasts. He had cause to be defensive. Me, Tank, Warlock, and the twins, rose up and stood behind Greg, anticipating a fight.

  “Fuck that tip shit, nigga! Ya’ll muthafuckas wouldn’t even give me that free soda ya’ll advertised—talking about I had to order over twenty dollars worth of shit and this is only $17.50. Now you tryin’ to vic my change! You must be sick, fool!”

  “Give that nigga his change before you get your ass fucked up.” Warlock growled. He was twenty years old by then, anorexicly skinny, and five inches shy of six feet. The delivery boy on the other hand was probably closer to twenty-five, well over six feet and swollen up like a heavyweight boxer. But one look at Warlock’s gold and you knew the man was a player. The pizza man looked Warlock up and down searching for a weapon then decided that he didn’t want to take any chances with a porchful of niggas in a strange neighborhood. For all he knew we could have been a gang or something with a house full of artillery.

  “Man, here’s your damned two-fifty! You cheap-ass muthafucka! A brotha can’t even make a damned livin’!”

  “Not off my money you can’t, muthafucka!”

  “Ya’ll shut tha fuck up! The damned movie’s on!”

  “Fuck you! Yella ass nigga!” Warlock joked, but he sat down to watch the film.

  We started dividing up the pizza and in no time at all the box was nearly empty.

  “Damn, niggas! I paid for the shit and all I get is one slice?”

  Tank was standing there with the box in his hand, one slice still left inside, chomping down on another slice held in his huge meaty paw.

  “Here, fool! Stop crying and take another slice!”

  “Two whole slices? Thanks.” Greg frowned.

  “Ay, if you don’t want it I’ll eat the muthufucka.”

  “Fuck that shit!”

  “Well all right then. Shut da fuck up and eat.”

  The credits rolled and all conversation died to a whisper. It was a Run Run Shaw classic, The Five Deadly Venoms. Huey began giving us a blow-by-blow rundown of the action as it unfolded.

  “See this big muthafucka right here? His name is Toad and he does this iron shirt technique that makes him impervious to weapons. Spears and swords just bounce right off of him. That’s a bad motherfucka right there.”

  “I bet a bullet would stop his ass.” Little Drew offered trying to sound hard. Everyone just ignored him and kept watching the flick. We all knew that Drew’s momma would kick his ass if she ever found him with a gun. Bitch ass nigga couldn’t even leave the block without telling his mom first.

  “See how in these Chinese movies when someone’s fighting a group of people they’re always moving, the camera angles keep changing, the people he’s fighting move in and out of camera range and everything is happening real fast so it don’t look like they’re just standing around waiting to get hit like in them fake-ass Van Damme flicks. Americans don’t know shit about making Kung Fu movies. This here is the real shit!”

  We watched two other films and then we decided to play football. It was about six o’clock in the evening and it had finally cooled down. Besides that, Drew’s mom made him bring the VCR back in the house.

  Darlene and Trina Livingston, two huge manly Jamaican girls who looked like female bodybuilders, had come out to play football with us. Darlene was the oldest. She was sixteen years old, had legs like Arnold Swartzenegger, and breasts like Pam Grier. She was the only one among us big enough to tackle Tank. Her younger sister Trina was just slightly smaller at 5’10” but no less intimidating. They were the best football players in the neighborhood. They could run, throw, catch, and hit like Mack trucks.

  We chose up sides and I got Darlene, fat Greg, and both twins. Huey got Trina, Tank, Warlock, and Nikky. Terrance had finally come back to reality, but was still in no condition to play so he just sat on the porch and talked shit about everyone. We made him a referee.

  We called the game 1-2-3 hold, but when it came down to it, it was straight up tackle. We played rig
ht in the middle of the street on concrete and asphalt. Slamming each other down hard on the steaming black top. Cars hardly ever came down our block and when they did we played right around them.

  Huey’s team had the edge in speed, but we had brute strength on our side. Seeing Darlene and Tank go at it was truly awesome. They weren’t pulling any punches, at least Darlene wasn’t, and it looked like they were going to kill each other, slamming into one another full force without helmets or pads. I was the only one who knew that Tank had a crush on her and that he was in heaven feeling her rock hard body slamming into him.

  At first our team steamrolled Huey’s. We slammed them into parked cars, denting not a few of them, slung them to the concrete like bundles of garbage, and wound up sending Warlock’s little ass home with a sprained ankle and bloody knees.

  Huey bobbed and weaved like Deon Sanders and nobody could catch him. In the end their speed proved too much for us. They beat us 42 to 35. I knew that we had only gotten that far because Tank was holding back when it came time to tackle Darlene. She on the other hand was trying to knock the stuffing out of him. It was funny to see his big, black, love-struck ass bouncing off the concrete over and over again still grinning at her like an idiot as she ran right over him. That was one of the best days of my life and the last day of my childhood. It was soon after that that our lives changed for good.

  — | — | —

  Chapter 7

  “This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”