The Old Neighborhood

by Bill Hillmann

  I started to fall. Tank punched Angel from the blind side. Angel got taller, then tipped over like a tree cut at the base. I got hit three more times before I flopped on the concrete. I tried to cover up as rubber sneaker soles thumped down on me heavily. They planted into my arms and chest and shot air out of my gut. I peeked up between my forearms. All I could see were black bodies silhouetted against the bright blue sky. They looked tall and narrow and distorted. They were laughing. I could hear little squeaky-ass BB laughing. I didn’t recognize any of them. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I felt caught inside some wrathful force of nature—an earthquake that wasn’t gonna stop ’til it was through with me. I could hear the groans and shouts from Ryan and Angel. Finally, for some reason, they stopped. I heard their feet patter off toward the different gangways.

  Monteff slowed and turned. He bounced on his toes. “Stay off this set you honky mothafuckas!” Monteff squeezed his fists at his sides. “This Moe’s set now... Black Stone, mothafucka!” he shouted as T-Money went by laughing. They shook-up—some new shit I hadn’t seen before. At the end, their left hands patted their chest twice.

  Ryan got to his feet and plodded after them. He clutched his temple.

  “Motherfuckers!” he shouted. “I’m gonna kill all you motherfuckers!” he screamed. Then, he lumbered back and pulled Angel and me to our feet.

  We stumbled back towards Hollywood Ave. My whole body ached. My heart pumped buckets in my chest. My whole torso swelled up like a balloon. Vomit bubbled in my throat. The sun beat down. The entire neighborhood seemed to shake and vibrate. This neon sheen radiated through the trees’ green leaves. Sparrows chirped loud like a clamor of applause. A thousand squeaking murmurs swirled in and out of the air above us. They chirped with the same cadence as the breeze flicking through the leaves.

  •

  WE WENT TO ANGEL’S HOUSE ’cause his mother wouldn’t be home for a few hours. We hung out, bewildered, in his living room. The lights were off, and the daylight seeped in through the yellow drapes. Ryan sat in an easy chair as knuckle-sized red knots blossomed up under his stubbly scalp like he’d been stoned. A red lump swelled on Angel’s jaw near the ear. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror—my eye was bloodshot. The tissue around it swelled red, and a few purple dots formed inside it like tiny nebulas. It felt like someone had scraped sandpaper across the film of my retina, and the vision in that eye was still blurry like fog on a windshield in the winter. We raided the freezer and grabbed ice and some frozen crap, then I laid down on the couch and flopped a bag of frozen peas over my eye. We didn’t say it, but we all knew everything had changed irreconcilably. There was no going back. We were on our own.

  After a few hours, Ryan got up, walked to the front door, and opened it. He stopped, looked back, and said, “I’m gonna talk to Mickey tonight.”

  “Alright.” I replied. I didn’t know what he meant.

  Angel just turned and looked from where he sat at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. Ryan nodded and walked out the door.

  •

  WHEN I WALKED IN the front door, Ma was on her way downstairs. She took one look at me and flipped shit. “Oh my God! What happened to you? Who did this? We need to go to the hospital and get that eye checked out!” I just headed past and went upstairs without even looking at her.

  “Ma, it ain’t that bad, alright? I’m fine. Nothing happened.” I turned the corner and went to my room. I stayed up there, prostrate on my bed, and waited it out—listening. I could hear all the motions in the house: the kids coming in from the back porch, Ma slowly stepping up the stairs, running the vacuum, jostling my doorknob, finding it locked, then slowly easing down the steps. Later, Dad surged in through the back screen door with his Thermos and lunch pail clattering. Rich rumbled in the front door and up the stairs into his room. His heavy metal music clicked on a few seconds later. All the while, I rehearsed answers to their questions in my mind. Answers to their little comments, ready to scream, “Yeah, Rich, they fucking jumped me! I wonder why!” right in his psycho, fucking racist-ass face!

  At dinnertime, I went downstairs—weak and hungry because I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The old man was already eating at the head of the table. He chomped aggressively as he cut and jabbed at his mound of mashed potatoes, cauliflower, and breaded pork chops. The whole mound was covered with a heavy sprinkling of black pepper. His eyes flashed at me for a crisp second as I stepped into the room, then he continued to eat. Rich sat facing me with his back to the window. His eyes lit up when he saw me, and he snickered as I walked to the table. I made my plate and sat down in between Jan’n’Rose on the long bench.

  “Now tell me what happened to your eye, honey,” Ma said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You fucked with the wrong motherfucker,” Rich drawled, then burst into laughter. Milk splattered from his lips onto his half-eaten dinner.

  Dad slammed his fork and knife to the table, and everyone went silent. He jabbed a finger at Rich. “Stop that shit.”

  “And whatever, Richard. How many times have you gotten your ass kicked?” Jan said, scowling at him. “Have you ever won a fight?”

  Rose choked a little, then quickly grabbed a rag and spit some food in it. Jan’s thin lips curled at the edges.

  Dad slammed his fist on the table. Everyone’s utensils and glasses of milk trembled. “I don’t want to hear anymore.”

  We finished the dinner in relative silence, and I went back up to my room. I took a couple Advil and laid in bed. It was just getting dark, and the orange-red of the sunset painted the east wall of my room. The thin meshing of the window screen splayed across it like chain-link armor. Images of retaliation soared through my mind—what I woulda done, shoulda done. I’m there in the alley and T-Money rushes up, but now there’s a twelve-pound sledgehammer in my hands. I squeeze the thick wood stalk and swing wide and hard. The iron sledge slaps into the side of his head. His skull elongates with the collision, then it shoots off his shoulders. Airborne, it arcs end-over-end all the way into Ryan’s backyard. There, Bear sits in wait; his wide brick of a head at attention. T-Money’s dome flops to a rolling stop at Bear’s paws. Then, Bear draws his enormous jaws around T-Money’s forehead. T-Money’s decapitated body froze before me, his arms and wrists cocked at moronic angles like someone frozen in a pop-lock dance mid-move.

  Then, the real images would flash. They’d surge up and wipe the fluttering joy from my chest, and I’d feel it all over again: the betrayal, the shame, the rage, the soreness in my whole body. I’d shove it all out of my head until I’d nod to sleep, then throttle awake. The nerves sparked and popped in my elbows, hands, and knees, jolting me until I was gone. Pitch black. Riding a freight elevator, descending slowly. The elevator shaft creaking and clanking above. Just enough light to see the metal fencing before me. A deep metallic bang as the descent halts. The door slides open rapidly. The light now only from the sky outside. I step out. Millions of stars blaze above. A crescent moon hangs overhead, low, enormous, and florescent white. Suddenly an orb, like a white meteor, emerged on the horizon and careened across the sky with five tentacles flailing behind it like streamers. A whistle blazed faintly, then louder, until it was like the scream of a steam engine. The meteor arced past the moon, then faded and disappeared. The howl fell lower until it came from all around me on ground level. It closed in from the distance. Then, hooves approached over gravel. The only direction the sound didn’t come from was behind me. I turned and ran, but the elevator was gone. I ran as fast as I could. My feet dug into the gravel until I fell and sank. The rock splashed my face, and I woke. My screen rattled. Then, pebbles plunked down the roof of my porch outside my window.

  I got up on my knees in bed and looked out the window screen. Hyacinth stood down on the patch of concrete that led from the sidewalk to the street. She smiled eagerly up at me, her eyes lit by the streetlamps.

  We sat on the front p
orch steps as the slow night traffic eased by. She had that worried look she got whenever I had a shiner or got banged up, or when anybody got hurt, really. She softly stroked my cheek with the smooth skin of her hand.

  “What happened?” She asked. Her auburn eyes were wide and hurt.

  “We got jumped,” I said, looking away.

  “Why? What for?” she urged, mystified.

  “My brother… It’s a long story….” I waved at the air before me as if the inconsequential truth hovered right there. “It don’t matter.”

  She smelled like coconut oil, and her skin was so soft and cool. I couldn’t understand how she could be so cool. All it took was her sitting beside me, our hips and sides touching, and my heart was thumpin’ like a rabbit foot. I rubbed my hands together, both of ’em all hot and sweaty. My throat swelled up. I was so fuckin’ glad she stopped by that my headache even went away. Her eyes got all watery, and then a tear slid down her cheek and dropped down on her tank-top. I reached my arm around her and squeezed. She was all warm and soft like dough. It made me want to squeeze her tighter, and I did. She let out a little sigh and looked up at me, her breath hot but still sweet in my face. Another droplet fell from her other eye, and I kissed it as it slid down her cheek. I tasted the salty wetness on the tip of my tongue. Mrs. Perez shut her bedroom window across the street, then evaporated. Hyacinth nestled her head into the side of my neck, and I whispered, “I’m fine. It’s OK.” She turned, and I kissed her mouth, all wet and warm and soft. It made me want to kiss her harder. She just tilted her head up, and we kissed long—her thick, damp lips alternating between soft and firm. Our tongues explored and folded over one another’s, and I touched her face, then neck. Her featherlike hair brushed against the back of my hand. She stopped crying, and we kissed like that for a long while—our mouths open, lips smushing. Finally, we stopped, and our eyes met, faces still close.

  “Hubba… Hubba…” Vicky’s little brother Alex said as he rode past on a beach cruiser that was way too big for him. We both burst into laughter. I flicked him off as he coasted past in the street. Her braces flashed sliver, her eyes sparkled, and then we kissed one more time.

  •

  I THOUGHT A LOT about things that night. Thought of what Lil Pat would have done; if he’d have seen it coming. Hell, he wouldn’t even have been hanging out with those motherfuckers in the first place. I didn’t believe that blacks were against us. I knew there was more to life than that. Jan’n’Rose were just normal girls. People didn’t have to hate each other. On the other hand, people did hate each other; it was everywhere I looked. Those dudes at the Dead-End-Docks were all full of hatred. Tank and Twon hated us, hated whites, hated blacks. Hell, they even hated each other. T-Money—I guess deep down he was still sore about what Rich had done to him, or maybe he’d sobered to the fact that there weren’t any white Black Stones. He was at the bottom rung now —a low-ranking Stone at Senn—and probably pissed off he was an errand boy still getting vetted. But Monteff. I couldn’t get over Monteff. He was my friend—my dear friend. We’d talked about all kinds’a shit. He knew almost as much about me and my family as Ryan did, and I knew all about his, too. How all the blacks at the Docks were blood related—half-brothers, cousins, uncles—and how difficult it made everything. How every family argument had the potential to turn into a bloody domestic involving the entire apartment complex. How no one in his family had ever gone to college, and that’s why he studied so hard and never got less than a B in anything. How he had to hide that, too, ’cause everybody’d ride on him if he told them he made honor roll. How they’d call him a lame if they knew. He kind of inspired me, really. Made me want to get my ass in gear and get my grades up so I could go to college.

  I just couldn’t get over it. He knew I wasn’t in on it. He even knew about Sy getting killed and how Rich had flipped. Maybe it was about race after all. Maybe we were separated by race—irreconcilably divided. I just didn’t have any other way to explain it then.

  It was the first time I’d ever gotten beaten-up for real, a true ass whoopin’. There was some solace in the fact that we’d been jumped, out-numbered, and caught off guard, but I still felt humiliated. I couldn’t find a shred of nobility in what’d happened. Deep-down, I wanted to be a good and righteous warrior, not some opportunist villain like those fucks had been. I wanted to fight nobly for noble things. To be ferociously loyal to my friends at all costs. I’d watched Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe fight. There was nobility in their battles. Win or lose, they both fought with a sense of greatness in their actions and a conviction in their punches. At the same time, they were both quiet, vulnerable. Each of them hurt and battered to the ropes. It was strange how in those battles there was no sense of weakness or humiliation in the loser. Mike Tyson racked up all his spectacular knockouts with intimidation and ferocity. There was no intimidating Bowe or Holyfield. They fought nobly and brave, and I wanted to be like that—a pure warrior. I knew I was far, far away from that, but it was what I wanted more than anything.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE JUNGLE

  BY THEN, Mickey Reid was the most feared TJO on the street. The ones badder than him were all in the penitentiary; terribly outnumbered, they were stacking years on their sentences for multiple in-house stabbing, drug, and murder convictions. Mickey’d killed anywhere from seven to fifteen people (depending on who you asked) over multiple infractions, such as: being a BGD, being a Royal, being an Assyrian King, burning him on a heroin deal, snitching, crashing into and totaling his brand new Camaro that he had neither papers nor insurance for. And one (supposedly) for spitting on his girl, though I can assure you it wasn’t because he wanted to defend the hood rat’s honor; it was the fact that he’d been slighted vicariously.

  He mostly shot people in the head with his .44 cal, but he strangled one and beat a few to death, too. It was all circumstance with him. A spontaneous ingenuity, you could call it. There was no premeditation. Even the Royal they kidnapped and tortured—they were just high, cranked up on speed, drunk, and stumbled onto the kid at a bus stop. They wrangled him into the trunk, took him to a basement, and beat him all night. They singed his eyeballs shut with a heated iron rod, sliced his genitals off. Then, they drove him to the rail lot by Bryn Mawr across from the cemetery and dumped him on the dark stone slope—still breathing. Then, they doused him with gas and lit him up. A TJO’d been stabbed to death by a Royal the month before, and Mickey lived for vengeance. Not just for the identifiable wrongs he’d been doled out, but for the wrongs God had dealt him long before he’d taken his first breath.

  •

  I WAS UP IN MY ROOM listening to Suicidal Tendencies later that week. I hadn’t gone out in days, embarrassed about my eye. I heard a knock on my open door and saw Ryan standing there with his stupid shit-eating grin streaked across his face. The knots on his head had flattened and turned bluish-purple. He stepped in, closing the door behind himself, then he yanked the waist of his sweatpants outward and dug his other hand into his crotch. He pulled up a big, rolled-up, clear plastic bag and tossed it on my bed beside me. I flinched away from it, and then I sat up and got off the bed. I stood and looked down at the unraveling plastic bag that was almost completely filled with faded-green nubs. I grabbed it and dumped some out on my covers. The dank, musty stench of the weed finally hit my nostrils. They looked like dehydrated, flattened-out Brussels sprouts with this orange, stringy fuzz threaded and twirled into them. It was all buds and more weed than I’d ever seen in my whole life.

  “Jamaican Red Hair,” Ryan proudly said, beaming.

  “Where’d you get this, bro?”

  “I talked to Mickey.” He looked at me with his crazy green eyes. “We’re in business.”

  We burst into laughter.

  “How much is it?”

  “It’s a O-Z, baby.” Ryan popped his red eyebrows up.

  “How’d you get the money?” I scooped the weed back into the bag,
then I picked it up and gawked at it.

  “Naw... he fronted us.” Ryan sat. “We owe him a hundred. We got two weeks, but it’ll be gone before Sunday.”

  “Hell yeah it will.” We slapped palms with a loud clap and headed over to Angel’s.

  •

  HOW TO EYEBALL DOWN AN OUNCE:

  A gram scale costs a hundred bucks, and we didn’t even know of a store that carried one. We coulda used Mickey’s scale, but we wanted to do it all on our own—prove to him that we didn’t need anyone holding our hands the whole way. So we broke it down according to the profit we wanted to walk away with—eyeballing it—using simple logic. All three of us sat down at Angel’s kitchen table, and Ryan dumped the bag onto the center of it. The buds avalanched down into a heaping pile with a mist of green dust sprinkled on top. Split the mound in half according to diameter and height. Then, you split those halves into equal quarters. Then, into eighths, making sure the ratio of buds and shake is evenly distributed. Now, an eighth should go for twenty-five dollars. At that rate, you’re set to make $200 total, but none of those metal-head bong-blowers or hippie-dippy bowl-tokers are gonna cough up twenty-five bucks on a regular basis. Mickey had schooled Ryan that there’s twenty-eight grams in an ounce. For the most part, a gram is about the size of a dime-bag, which goes for ten dollars—also known as a sawbuck. Break that gram in half, and you got a nickel bag, which goes for five—also known as a fin. A nickel was our most likely sale. I ran home and stole a fresh roll of sandwich bags out of the cabinet and made it back in a couple minutes while Ryan hit the corner store for a Philly blunt.

  You can get two baggies out of each sandwich bag by cutting the two bottom corners into triangles. We broke it down to eighteen dime-bags and twenty nickels and started filling the bags and tying tight little knots in the ends with our fingernails. Angel dug out the funkiest buds, rolled a blunt right there at the table, and sparked up. We started making phone calls from his house phone and bragging about how ‘motherfuckin’ dank!’ this Jamaican Red Hair was. We were set to make sixty bucks each. It was gonna be easy as shit, and we were gonna smoke for free, too.