Ice

by Ice-T

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Here’s what’s real strange. Everybody—all the adults around me, I mean—expected me to be losing my shit. Just trippin’. And not only was I not trippin’, I was not even engaged in it. It was almost like I had the ability to will myself into this zone where it really didn’t seem to be happening to me. I was emotionally about a million miles away from all the adults, all the crying and the handkerchiefs, and I just had one thought in my mind:

  So what’s next? What’s the next move?

  Yeah, I was detached. But looking back on my childhood, I don’t think there was an attachment. In other words, even when I was a little kid and I’d fall off my bike, skin my knees and want to cry, there was nobody to really cry to. So I learned to suck it up really quick. I’d hit the ground, dust my ass off and not show anybody that I was fucked up. I wasn’t one of these kids who was always coming home with hurt feelings, running to hug my mother. None of that clingy, emotional shit was my reality. I grew up in a nonaffectionate household. I think kids are trained to know what they’re going to get, and once they get a taste of it, they’ll always want more. It’s like that shit with Pavlov’s dog. If you cuddle a kid a lot, he’ll want more cuddling. If you don’t, he’ll just accept that as his reality. He doesn’t look for the added affection.

  Everybody in the family was bugging out that I didn’t cry when my father died. They remembered how I hadn’t shed a tear for my mother, either. But I just wasn’t built like that. Wasn’t wired like that. I didn’t have an ounce of self-pity in my bones. It didn’t hit me, Damn, I’m an orphan. Even as a twelve-year-old kid, I knew I was going to have to make it on my own, and my survival instincts were kicking in.

  “WHETHER HARDCORE OR NOT

  YOU WORE THE RIGHT COLOR

  OR YOUR ASS GOT SHOT …”

  —“THAT’S HOW I’M LIVIN’ ”

  2.

  I DIDN’T HAVE A LOT of family, which meant I didn’t have a lot of options. Like I said, my mother had no relatives that we knew; my father had two sisters, and for a few months I lived with my aunt who lived right behind our duplex, but then I was sent to my other aunt and her husband in Los Angeles—supposedly just for the summer.

  One afternoon, a few weeks into the summer, a delivery truck with all these boxes arrived—my clothes from the house in New Jersey. Shit, it was disorienting. Nobody even took the time to explain what was happening. I didn’t know my aunt and her family; they were essentially strangers to me. And what made it tense was the fact that my aunt had already raised two kids; her youngest, my first cousin Earl, had just graduated from high school, so my aunt and uncle were in that mode to retire, be empty nesters, get on with that next stage of their lives.

  And now here comes this kid from Jersey. And not just any kid—an orphan, an adolescent, a boy just entering the wild-the-fuck-out years. Yeah, I felt a lot of resentment from them about me being there. Nobody said it outright, of course, but the vibe was always, Okay—Tracy, we got to take care of you. Never: We want to take care of you.

  I was in limbo. Being relocated, when you’re not expecting it, is some crazy shit. Even if you don’t miss the kids you grew up with, you miss your routine, your habits, the way you know all the shortcuts and the back alleys when you’re bombing around on your bike. Now you’re in an absolutely foreign place. As foreign to you as Algeria or Argentina. You realize that you’re back at square one. You realize that you don’t know shit.

  And I was about to find out the hard way that not knowing shit can be a life-or-death proposition for a teenager growing up in South Central L.A.

  FORTUNATELY, I DIDN’T GET THROWN straight into the gladiator pits. I caught a break in that respect. My aunt lived in a middle-class black neighborhood, View Park. And the first school I went to in L.A. was Palms Junior High—a predominantly white school in Culver City. They bused the black kids there, part of the court-mandated integration at the time in L.A. But it wasn’t just the middle-class black kids like me coming into this white neighborhood; that was the first time I encountered kids that were coming on buses from South Central. They were tough in a way I’d never encountered, not actually gang members yet, but they were the younger brothers of cats who were definitely banging.

  Going to a mostly white junior high in L.A., that was a different zone. Because now you’re getting bused in with all the black kids, and you’ve got the little white girls every morning, already out in front of the school checking you out. And it’s the height of puberty, so everybody’s hormones are out of control. That’s where the racial shit starts kicking in. Not some stupid, unspoken rule about all black kids going home when it gets dark. This was a lot more dangerous, because this was sexual. I’m going to tell it to you straight—I don’t give a fuck. Little white girls are intrigued by little black boys. You ain’t never going to shake that. And that leads to some of the biggest problems in the world, at least as far as the racists see it.

  Maybe we had a little bit more swagger or whatever, but from the moment we got off the bus, the white girls thought we were the hottest shit going. That caused some drama. Because if you had a white girlfriend at Palms Junior High, you still had to get back on the bus and deal with the sisters. The white girls lived in Culver City, right by the school, but when the school day ended your ass was going back to the ’hood. And in junior high, your relationships are solely based at school. No one goes home to hang out at each other’s house. The sisters used to give the brothers an earful about talking to them white chicks. I didn’t have any girlfriends in junior high—I wasn’t cool enough yet. But I was seeing a lot of my homeys dealing with all that drama.

  The biggest trip to me with L.A. was the size. The city is so sprawling, so spread out. It wasn’t like the neighborhoods I was familiar with back East where there’s twenty-five or thirty houses on the block. In some parts of L.A., your closest friend could be a five-minute drive away.

  The first kid my age I met in View Park was Billy Arnold—years later he got killed in a terrible motorcycle accident. He was one of the coolest cats I ever met in my life. Billy had that kind of cool that’s just inborn. I mean, this kid even had a cool Moms. He had a swagger, he had the flyest clothes and records; he even had a bedroom that looked like a seventies bachelor pad.

  When I was getting sized up by the kids in the neighborhood—as a new-jack, don’t matter where, you’re always gonna get tested—Billy for some reason said he had my back. And because I was friends with this cool-ass kid, I was more or less connected. Across the street from Billy lived the Staintons, and one of the brothers was a black belt, so nobody even thought about fucking with them. Between Billy Arnold and the Stainton brothers I never really had problems with bullies or assholes trying to mess with me.

  During junior high, we were still protected from the whole gang thing. Even though kids from gang-affiliated neighborhoods were getting bused to Palms, back in the seventies when I was in the eighth grade the gang situation was just starting in earnest. But I was about to get a crash course in the gangster life in high school.

  AFTER GRADUATING FROM JUNIOR HIGH, I decided I wanted to go to a local high school, Crenshaw High, which was walking distance from my aunt’s home. I was sick of the busing bullshit.

  From the jump, my head was spinning. Number one, it was an almost 100 percent black school. Wasn’t one white kid there. And just one Mexican. L.A. is fucking segregated like that.

  All these kids coming from inner-city junior highs to Crenshaw already got their little cliques. There were a total of four guys that went to Palms that came to Crenshaw, including my boys Franzell and Burnett, so I didn’t have a crew. I wasn’t really connected. My homey Sean E. Sean—folks got to know him later in my records and videos—was a grade below me, so he was still at Palms when I started Crenshaw.

  I felt like I was walking into a prison yard by myself. Hell yeah, it was intimidatin
g. Plus, I was a tiny ninth grader, and there were eighteen-year-old twelfth graders. These dudes were big—looked like grown-ass 225-pound men with sideburns and a five o’clock shadow at noon.

  When I hit Crenshaw High, the gang situation started to heat up in the L.A. school system. You have to understand—gangbanging started from a very small area in South Central L.A. The Crips and Bloods started in a handful of blocks, and it took a while for it to branch out through all the schools in a city as big as Los Angeles. It started down at Washington High. Washington, Jordan, Jeff, Freemont. Those were the ground-zero high schools where the gangs were coalescing. And by that summer, the gang life was just hitting Crenshaw. In its own way, Crenshaw was a crucial location, because it was the school that was the unofficial dividing line between the East Side and the West Side.

  The dividing line between East and West is Crenshaw Boulevard. Technically the dividing line is the Harbor Freeway—that’s in gang terms—but in school terms, the line is drawn at Crenshaw Boulevard. After you go to the other side of Crenshaw, you get to Westchester, Palisades, University, L.A. High, Fairfax—those are all West Side schools. The middle-ground schools are Crenshaw and Manual Arts—right down the middle of the East–West divide.

  There were subtle distinctions, but they meant a lot to kids. The West Side kids were always known to be a little bit slicker, have a little bit more money, dress a little bit more fly. The East Side kids were tougher, wilder, more aggressive. Straight up—I understand it now—they were just the poorer kids. We used to say that the girls on the West Side looked better, too—again, it’s just money; they could afford to have nicer clothes and gear. Also, as you moved more to the West Side, you’d get more into the interracial dating, so you’d see more and more mixed-looking kids. We had the lighter-skinned black girls on the West Side. And we thought that was something to be proud of.

  Because Crenshaw was a borderline school, there was still a mixing of the sets, and you had Bloods and Crips in the halls at the same time. That led to serious drama. Constant beefing. I remember at one point Time magazine referred to us as Fort Crenshaw.

  Nobody schooled me about the colors. That was an unwritten code that ran deep. And you didn’t have a lot of time to decipher it. You’d see cats with pressed khakis, bomber jackets from the Army surplus store. They rocked Levis, but in their own distinctive way. Always cuffed on the outside. Some of the neighborhood O.G.’s would go for this Prohibition Era–look, rocking pinstriped vests and a kind of fedora called the ace-deuce. The ace-deuces look almost like derbies, but they’ve got a micro-brim around them, really small and tight to the head. Cats would take hairnets and pull them over the top of the ace-deuce. They’d wear suspenders, but they’d let them droop down around the waist, not tight over their shoulders. Crips were known for their crocus-sack shoes, always in shades of blue, brown, or black. That was a gangster staple. And, of course, there was the flag. The blue bandanna had to be folded precisely in the left back pocket.

  Crenshaw High was run by the Hoover Crips. When I started at Crenshaw, the biggest gang rivalry was with the Brims. Crips and Brims. The Brims wore red and Crips wore blue. The Crips kept their rag in the left pocket; the Crips pierced their left ear. The Brims did everything on the right. Like a mirror image.

  The Crips had all these different divisions and sets: Eight-Trey Gangsters, the Hoovers, the Harlem Crips. Every other gang united against the Crips, and any gang that wasn’t Crip by default became Brim. The Van Ness Boys, the Denver Lanes, the Pirus, the Inglewood Family, the Athens Park Boys, all of them united into a coalition—over time the Brims came to be known as the Bloods.

  When I first got to Crenshaw that summer, there was still a gang in effect called the Bishops—a Brims gang. Over time, during my years at Crenshaw, all the Brims started to go to Manual Arts, and Dorsey. The Crips took over Crenshaw. Anyone who wasn’t a Crip, or from a Crip neighborhood, would transfer out.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for me to learn how to walk the walk. In South Central, it’s called survival. You had to know to wear your blue and look a certain way or else deal with the consequences. Shit runs so much deeper than just not wearing red. You had to learn which neighborhoods were sworn enemies. Over time there were these major wars between rival sets of Crips, like the Rollin’ ’60s and the Eight-Trey Gangsters—Monster Kody’s set—and cats kept on gunning down each other for decades. With those dudes, the banging became generational—younger brothers and cousins taking revenge on murdered family—like vendettas in the Mafia.

  You had to know to call your people “cuz” and never “blood.” Just saying, “S’up, blood?”—something I used to hear older dudes say all the time back in New Jersey—could get you gunned down quick.

  On most blocks in South Central, there really are no neutrals. Everyone’s forced under the jurisdiction of the gangs just to stay out of the drama. You might show up in South Central a clean-cut, square kid—like I did—but before you know it, you got the blue or red bandanna folded up perfectly in your left or right back pocket. Everyone learns the rules fast. Even the girls. Eventually, if you went anyplace in town and said, “I go to Crenshaw,” people would consider you a Crip by affiliation.

  You might try to tell them, “But I ain’t in no gang.”

  “Naw, nigga. You from Crenshaw. You a Crip. You know them niggas.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Shut the fuck up. You know ’em. And we gonna send them a message through you.”

  And that’s the trip. In the gangbanging world, you can get it just for knowing motherfuckers. It’s murder by affiliation.

  WHEN I STARTED AT CRENSHAW, the most feared shot caller in L.A. was Stanley “Tookie” Williams. Of course, years later Tookie became nationally known while he was on death row—considered a stone-cold murderer by some; admired as a rehabilitated anti-gang activist and author by others. Tookie wasn’t the founder of the Crips—that was Raymond Washington—but Took became the undisputed leader of all the West Side Crips. From time to time, Tookie and his crime partner, Jimel Barnes from the Avalon Gardens Crips, used to roll through Crenshaw.

  They were both huge, hardcore bodybuilders and, throughout South Central, they were treated like rock stars. Back then, gangbanging was based on lifting weights. Wasn’t all this gunplay shit. And you better believe Tookie was serious about his weight game. Tookie looked like he could take away Arnold Schwarzenegger’s title. When you saw Tookie in real life, you felt like you were ten years old and he was forty. It’s like, “These are some grown-ass men.” You didn’t even want to make eye contact with them.

  All the original hardcore bangers were diesel, and that’s where a lot of the gangster posturing originated. Back then dudes would fight. Back then you had to have hand skills. Wasn’t nobody shooting nobody over the dumb, petty shit like they do nowadays. It wasn’t based on that. Back then you had actual tough guys. Not everybody was a muscle-bound monster; there was always some little guys in the clique, but trust me, they could fight, too.

  Tookie and Jimel looked almost like twins, except that Jimel was light-skinned and Tookie was darker. Most days, they dressed identically in farmer overalls with the bib down, showing off their bare chests, shoulders, and arms. They’d pull up at house parties in a low-rider, and actually had some younger Crips in their set—walking beside them, rubbing baby oil on their muscles so they could pose, flex, and have all these sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls swarming them, screaming, going crazy.

  Tookie wasn’t a regular presence at Crenshaw, but I was in homeroom with some of the most feared Crips of the time. Cats like Babyface. Anthony Hatchett. Jaw Bone. These were legendary banger names.

  One time this banger from Van Ness Boys, a feared Brim named Butch, showed up unannounced and just mobbed through the school. He came through Crenshaw on some one-man-army shit. The high-ranking Crip bangers weren’t around that day. Butch didn’t fuck anybody up; he just walked around, posturing, threw his set up, talking mad shit.


  The next day when the real bad-ass Crips got to Crenshaw, that’s when it got violent. They started smacking niggas up.

  “Yo, Butch was up in this muthafucka? What the fuck?”

  They were pissed that we didn’t defend our turf. But Butchie was big. Butchie looked like he could rep three hundred easily on the bench. We wasn’t doing nothing to him. We just gave him a wide berth and hoped he’d leave quietly.…

  Another time—before all the Brims transferred out of Crenshaw—I had a run-in with a Van Ness Boy named Gary. We were all in the school weight room. I’m trying to get buff, trying to get some weight on. I’m kind of standing off to one side, waiting for Gary to finish using the flat bench.

  Gary wasn’t quite as big as Tookie—but he was still one of the most jacked-up and scary-looking dudes you ever want to see. I didn’t know who he was, didn’t know his rep with the Brims. He was big as fuck, sure, but I didn’t know this dude as a notorious banger.

  For some reason, my stupid ass, while he’s on the bench—a whole mess of forty-five-pound plates rattling—I get this uncontrollable urge to make a loud fart sound with my mouth, as soon as he lowers the bar to his chest and goes to press it.

  I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.

  Gary locks out the bar, racks the weights, sits up real slow, then looks at me.

  He’s real quiet at first: “Oh, you think that’s funny?”

  Now, I got this swoll-up 260-pound killer glaring at me. “Nigga, come here!”

  He takes me into this little area, between the gym and locker room. There was a short hallway, and he closed the door, locked me in there with him.

  Then Gary tells me to hit him as hard as I can in the chest.